No one said that the world should be a fair place. And indeed it is not. But one of the things about the World Wide Web is that traditionally a teenager in a bedroom with a good idea can go on to make good and perhaps build a successful business, even make a fortune. The place is fairer and often supportive of new ideas. I have a worry, however, and I have no idea how widely shared this is, that worry is that the world of link building and wide scale corporate SEO is making it more and more difficult for the small guy to be noticed on the web. What I am discovering is that I am going to need a very big SEO exercise for my company to get out there at all. The world is just bulging with competing web development agencies.
This is not a personal grumble at all. My own company has had a strong client base and only recently has really worked hard to increase its outside audience. But somehow the need for this massive SEO exercise seems to defeat the point of the search engine. What is more increasingly I am finding that I have to look through four or five page to find things that are not heavily optimised. For example type in “insurance” then try to find documents relating to serious academic study of the insurance industry. On Google you need to type insurance study and even then about half the results lead to commercial insurance companies.
But from a young business perspective it is becoming harder and harder to carve a niche – and I really wonder if our modern search engines are not beginning to become overvalued and over exploited.
If this is the case then modern search engines are perhaps at there zenith – suggesting that there is something beyond.
