Insights from Nebo

Hiroshi Yamauchi, an ambitious and arrogant young man, was named the head of his family’s playing card business when no other successor was available. Wanting to grow his family’s empire, he decided to pay a visit to the biggest player in the card game. After seeing their tiny office in Cincinnati, Ohio, however, he realized just how small the game really was. Out of this realization, the company we know as Nintendo, was born.

Once upon a time, when the Internet was young, people like Al Gore called it the Information Superhighway. The nickname was in reference to the massive amounts of information we would have access to, being linked to other people, places, things and ideas from all around the world. According to Eli Pariser, however, that theory is becoming just as antiquated as it’s former pseudonym.

Proms, popularity contests, and Friday night football. These are some of the elements that helped define our identities at a special place called high school. The glory days for some and a time best forgotten for others, it is here that we learned valuable lessons about who we are and our place in society.

Last September, Google introduced its Instant Search application. By providing "instant" results, users would save about 2-5 seconds per search, with a global user estimate of about 11 hours saved per second.

Word of mouth has and always will beat any other form of advertising, especially in today's ambiguous climate.  According to Eating the Big Fish by Adam Morgan, as people’s faith in authority continues to deteriorate, they are turning more and more to family, friends, and strangers for the latest and greatest innovations. From product reviews on Amazon, TripAdvisor, Net Promoter, to the random person you make small talk with in passing, people are putting more equity in their fellow man than the powers that be. And you can make this work for you.

SEO is an obscure field to most people. It sounds strange, technical, and gimmicky. And with good reason. The history of SEO is filled with stories of technical loopholes and acrobatics that could make the worst websites on the planet rank for extremely irrelevant searches.

Thankfully, as search engines have evolved, SEO has been forced to mature and move out of its technical silo. Google and crew have become much better at deciphering what people actually care about, and, consequently, ranking well now means getting people to care about your business -- at least relative to your competition. The era of narrow-minded SEO is drawing to an end.

Does this mean that there's nothing technical about SEO? Not at all. There are still best practices that need to be implemented to ensure that search engines can even read your site at all, and, once they do, that they interpret it in the ideal way.

What it does mean is that SEO has shifted. Things like brand, design, customer service, and all of your promotional efforts are having an affect on your search engine rankings. If you don't care about integrating SEO into these efforts, don't waste your money on SEO.

Marketing doesn't just live in the marketing department. Successful businesses recognize that anything that impacts customer experiences and perceptions is a part of what drives the bottom line. Likewise, search can't just live in the IT or SEO department. It has to be given a seat at the larger table, where SEO professionals and agencies can advise on how to leverage everything a company is doing in a way that benefits the SEO effort and is consistent with the brand.

If your SEO team is uninterested in the larger picture, content with trying to stay one technical gimmick ahead of the search engines, then you should look for someone new to lead the way.