The Clash of Search and Social Networking Titans!

By Social Editors • on August 14, 2009

SFGate — Social media sites like Facebook are changing the game in the Internet search space, attracting large audiences and search activities and encroaching on search engine turf, panelists stressed during a technical conference Tuesday. But SEO (search engine optimization) remains very much alive, they added.

The clash between social media and search engines was a highlight of a panel session entitled “Search: Where to Next?” covering the future of search at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Calif. Responding to the question of whether social media has caused SEO to be dead on arrival, panelist Eli Goodman, search evangelist at market intelligence provider comScore, noted the popularity of social sites like Facebook and Twitter but stressed that he did not believe SEO was dead.

Last month, Microsoft and Yahoo made major waves by signing a search deal.

“I believe that what’s happening here is that maybe it’s the way that we define it,” and determining what is relevant, Goodman said.

In addition to the major core search engines, there are more than 3 billion searches per month on YouTube in the United States and more than a billion searches monthly on Facebook, Goodman added. “[What] you have to remember is that the places where people are comfortable in getting relevant results is spreading out,” he said. Searchers are setting the tone for relevant searches, said Goodman.

SEO is not dead, and companies need to make sure content is optimizing to show relevant results, said Heather Dougherty, research director at Web analysis firm HitWise…

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