It has been a while since there the requisite “SEO is dead” conversation.  But I’ve been thinking a lot about the longevity of search.  Let’s face it, my career revolves around the product offerings from roughly three main companies (and one of those companies controls a 70%+ market-share).

While Google is nowhere near going out of business, the search industry is seeing a significant challenger in social media.  Numerous start-ups have sought to capture the social web.  A few have already seen significant traction, a la Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter.  Social sites are now starting to drive more referral traffic to some major sites than traditional search engines.  Crowdsourced traffic is surpassing algorithmic traffic (in a few select cases).

So what does this mean for search marketers, particularly SEOs?  First, I think it means that the search engines will have more external factors to consider when ranking pages.  Many of the SEO bloggers who acknowledge this point refer to it as the catalyst for the demise of SEO.  But we have seen this before.  In the past few years, external linking has increase in importance to drive traffic and rankings.  But SEOs have been able to adapt and find ways to gain quality links.

Still, I feel as though keyword targeting will eventually become less and less important, as SEOs will have less and less control over targeting specific keywords.  Search marketers will need to take a more holistic view of their campaigns, as they realize that they have less and less direct control over the factors that are used to rank sites in the search engines.

With this, content and architecture will increase in importance.  Yes, these factors are important already, as SEOs know.  But big companies still do not embrace best practices, opting instead for Flashy, easy to manage sites that present significant issues for search.

As external ranking factors become more important, specifically pertaining to social media, companies will need to make it as easy as possible for lay users to share sites with friends, family, coworkers, etc.  Strategically, search marketers who can harness social media to direct traffic to landing pages where users can perform a desired action will find success.

While marketers grasp with the decreasing ability to control keyword rankings, content will become more important.  Latent semantic indexing (LSI) will gain prominence as search engines try to develop more information about the domain and what the domain’s content is about on an aggregate level.

Social media will change search, but it will not not be the demise of search.  The fundamentals will still be to create great content  with site architecture that allows content to be easy to find, easy to share.

While I was browsing through Facebook this evening, I came across a new feature I hadn’t seen before called Facebook Lexicon.  I’m not sure how I missed this, apparently it’s been around since April 2008.

Given that January saw more layoff in the United States than we have seen in decades, I decided to do a comparative search with Facebook Lexicon for the terms “laid off” and “hired.”

Results of the queries "laid off" and "hired" in Facebook Lexicon.

The results are certainly not surprising.  In 2008, hirings appeared to increase steadily from April till mid-June, when many new graduates are hitting the job market.  After June, hirings appear to decrease on a steady basis through the end of the year.

Mentions of layoff stayed generally low throughout the early portion of 2008.  Then right around late September and early October it appears that layoffs started to significantly increase.  This is not surprising.

What is surprising, however, is that it appears that mentions of hiring are not terribly far off from where they were this time in 2008.  Certainly layoffs are much higher than last year, but at least it appears that companies are still hiring.

I love computers.  I really do.  They help us get a lot of things done, and they help us exchange information in new and meaningful ways, and I really love that.