Google Blog Post by Amit Singhal
Search Engine Optimization Jun 24, 2011
Google Blog Post by Amit Singhal
1. Follow your heart, and do what you love because happiness is worth much more than any amount of money.
Google Blog Post by Amit Singhal – As of 2014, Amit Singhal had been in the search industry for 20-plus years, and with Google for 13 of those years. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in computer science from IIT Roorkee, an MS in computer science from the University of Minnesota Duluth, and a Ph.D. in information retrieval from Cornell University.
Amit Singhal & Guy Kawasaki: The Future of Google Search in a Mobile World
Between his master’s and Ph.D. studies, there was a time in the early 90s when Amit’s studies were on hold and he was working full-time. When he began considering leaving his job to pursue his Ph.D., he told Guy Kawasaki at SXSW 2013 that most people encouraged him to keep working, telling him it was crazy to quit his job to go back to school and barely scrape by on an $ 800-per-month graduate stipend. His family could not financially support him; how would he make it?
Despite the pushback, he packed up with his wife, quit his job, and went back to school. Why? Because “my heart said ‘I want to do this. I want to get a Ph.D. in search. “I loved every moment of it,” he says, “And here I am sitting in front of you some 20 years later because I loved it. And that’s what it’s all about.”
When Guy asks him what career advice, if any, he has to offer people aspiring to make it in the technology business, Amit shares the advice he provides his children: “Follow your heart, and do what it says. Because if you do, you will sleep happy, and happiness is worth much more than any amount of money you can make.”
2. User experience should always be your top priority. If it’s not suitable for your user, don’t do it.
Amit loves to tell the story of start-up Google turning down millions of dollars and refusing to place “dancing monkey ads” on its home page because Larry Page and the team all agreed that the ads would be a bad user experience.
In Amit’s book – and Google’s book – user experience should always be the number one priority. Care about your users, do it for them, and you will succeed, he tells Guy Kawasaki and his SXSW audience more than once in his keynote interview. “Users come first, we need to give them our services at an amazing speed, and nothing should compromise user experience. It is that belief that has helped Google in times when it could have made wrong decisions.”
When asked about voice search, Amit describes Google’s vision, saying, “I think moving forward, the entire ecosystem will evolve to actually support that type of search – that future Star Trek computer – because that’s what users want.”
When probed about whether we’re truly supposed to “buy” the “romantic” tale of Google’s quest to save humanity one search at a time, Amit says: “Absolutely. What other way is there? In the future, we, collectively as the Web community, will work for our users, which is the entire human race. And we need to improve their lives; otherwise, what are we here for? Why are we doing this?”
When a SXSW audience member asks him what action a small business with a limited budget should take to stand out from the crowd, Amit’s words of wisdom are: “Work for your customers; do the right thing for your customers. That’s the way to stand out. No business is built overnight, and you shouldn’t expect your business to be huge overnight. You acquire customers by working for them for years.”
The moral of the story? If it’s not suitable for your user, don’t do it. Millions of dollars are short-lived; happy customers can last a lifetime.
3. Mobile and wearable technology will be the future.
Amit truly wants the Internet to serve people when they need it, in the way they need it. And for him, that means “designing search for the future, where it is everywhere” and creating “technology [that] should fade into the background so it can give you what you need as you’re doing what you love doing.”
If you glossed over them, there are three essential parts to Amit’s above statements: “it is everywhere,” “fades into the background,” and “give[s] you what you need as you’re doing what you love doing.”
What Amit is describing is a world where search is a part of your daily routine, not a disruption. He’s describing the voice-activated Star Trek computer that tells you things you need to know before you even ask for the information; a search engine that works fluidly with you so that you can use it while you are doing whatever it is you love. That means hands-free when you’re flying a kite with your daughter or mobile when you’re out of town looking for somewhere to eat.
In his SXSW interview, Amit brings up the cartoon we’ve all seen where the Neanderthal evolves into a walking Homo sapiens jo devolve into a slumped over tech guy in a computer chair. According to Amit, we’re entering a “second wave” of this evolution, where people start standing up and walking around again.
4. “You should think of good SEO as marketing to the Web search engine.”
What does the man who is considered the founding father of Google’s contemporary search algorithm say when Guy Kawasaki asks him if he thinks “SEO is bull—”? He says, “No, that would be like saying marketing is bull—.”
“You should think of good SEO as marketing to the Web search engine,” he says. Optimizing for search is “basically telling website owners what to do and what not to do so that search engines can actually index your site. […] There’s a lot of value that SEO adds to content because it’s marketing that content to a search engine, which is an important aspect of this ecosystem.”
In other words, implant the definition of “marketing” into the following sentence to set this point home – SEO is the process of creating, communicating, and delivering to Google offerings (content and web pages) that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Well said, Amit!
5. Want to rank on page one? Content and speed matter.
According to Amit, “A perfect search engine should know exactly what you mean and give you exactly what you want. And to build that perfect search engine, we have to be comprehensive, relevant, and fast.”
This quote happens within the first three minutes of Amit’s SXSW interview with Guy Kawasaki. It really establishes a theme for the rest of the keynote: relevant content and speed are essential, not only to Google as a service provider, but to anyone wanting to rank well with the search engine.
When asked the most common SEO question of all – how to improve ranking in search engines – Amit doesn’t recommend link building, authorship, or schema to his SXSW audience. Instead, he says, “Overall, it’s all about high-quality content and catering to your audience in a speedy website.”
“We at Google have time and time again said, and seen it happen, that if you build high-quality content that adds value and your users, your readers, seek you out, then really you don’t need to worry about anything else. You build high-quality content that adds value on top of what’s already there, and your site will work automatically. When it comes to companies, if they build fast websites that cater to their users’ needs, then, really, they can make a bunch of SEO mistakes and it wouldn’t hurt them.”
6. Don’t take yourself so seriously.
The first thing out of Amit Singhal’s mouth when he walked on the stage for his SXSW keynote interview was “Hi everyone! I am Andy Rubin. I’ve been working on my tan.” Throughout the interview, he banters with Guy Kawasaki and tells him at one point that it will take more than 20 years for him to become funny.
He uses technical terms like “dancing monkeys.” He says that the effects he sees search engines having on the world make him so happy that he sometimes feels like jumping for joy. As mentioned in the intro, he’s a big deal. But what makes him really kind of a big deal is that he doesn’t think he’s “kind of a big deal.” Sometimes, attitude is everything, and Amit Singhal has a great one.
# Google Blog Post Excerpts from Amit Singhal
Original Post: https://www.bruceclay.com/blog/6-lessons-from-amit-singhal/