Well, maybe not quite. I’ve been thinking lately about the sexy, wily, real time search and the old-fashioned, chivalrous land of SEO, and how the two will eventually find a healthy, functional, and enduring relationship.
Real Time Search Still Hasn’t Found Herself
RTS is all a flutter with all of the attention she is getting – from everyone. And everyone else.
We are already seeing the incredibly powerful applications – and implications – of RTS in every aspect of our lives – private and public, social and commercial (but the line has even blurred here, hasn’t it?). If RTS is querying real time publishing and you agree with Danny that real time publishing is microblogging (the world the Twitter currently rules) – then real time search has barely scratched the surface of declaring herself as an accessible, reliable, and (gasp) indexable web resource. In other words, as a hot twenty-something. Right now she’s just legal.
SEO is The Man
Yep, I said it. SEO is The Man. And I do mean this in the weight lifting, football watching, beer drinking, beef eating, keep your hands off my daughter kind of way. After all, where do people turn when they are being bullied by the big bad PPC spend? Who does everyone run to, even in a terrible economy, for protection? I think that somewhere down the road, we will begin to see an integration, a real relationship emerge – one in which real time search is much more strongly (narrowly?) defined, having figured out what she wants in life (potentially with another big real time publishing player in the mix to challenge Twitter) – and where SEO the stud in fact loosens up, and his identity becomes a bit more broadly defined to include an entirely new “search” engine optimization set of tasks, tools, outlets, and capabilities. SEO as we know him will find some new parts of himself he previously was afraid to acknowledge. He gets a bit new-agey, if he wants her hand. Maybe a new subset of SEO, called RTSO, could evolve – but given the overwhelm of acronyms in our industry we may just resist that temptation despite our proclivity for things shorter, faster, cooler. Despite our proclivity for niches within a niche.
As Bruce Clay’s blog suggests, RTS right now is, for the most part, figuring out who she is, strutting all over the world yet seemingly limited to social media aggregators. SEO, with his many years on miss RTS, is admittedly a bit gun-shy, still pumping his iron (and did I mention the beer?). He’s got to get to a yoga class before he’s going to have a chance of finding a meaningful connection with her. First he’s got to know where to find her, even.
Vegas and Beyond
So, for now these lovers are flirting, heavily. They just might get married in Vegas, but their true relationship will take time to reveal itself.
But when they eventually do come together, they will likely make each other much, much, much better individuals, and together, well – they might be a power couple in the making.
-Jessie
