This column is the personal view of the editor of this Website, Sorab Ghaswalla. This Website may or may not agree with the same.
Content and online search have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship since the latter’s birth. Both face a big challenge today, and that is to ensure that content matches an online searcher’s intent. Or, for starters, the intent of a category of searchers.
The task of matching content with intent is not new. It would not be wrong to say it’s been there since search went online. But the urgency is being felt more now because of content explosion.
When one looks at the website traffic channels’ pie chart, online organic search is still number one, accounting for as much as 60% of the traffic. Much of that is from Google Search Engine, followed by other assorted engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo. It is quickly followed by inorganic search as a traffic source.
Intent – what exactly is an internet surfer looking for when searching for a particular topic – is a science that search engine algorithms have yet to master. Not surprising because the computer software-driven search engines simply work on a “match the search word with a keyword” formula. It’s been trial and error so far, so to speak, although there’s certainly a method to the madness, which is, mating the search word(s) with the keyword(s) in the content indexed by the web crawlers. Helping along are search engine “allies” like tags, backlinks, headers and all those offline and online SEO tactics and tools. But figuring out (or near about) what exactly a human searcher wants when he types in a set of search words is like getting your hands on the holy grail of online search.
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