Prior to the rise of social media, the popular way to get your product noticed online was through SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Despite all the self-proclaimed experts saying SEO is not “gaming the system”, optimizing is by definition reverse engineering and exploiting through pattern recognition. It is a cycle of subtle changes, measuring results, and then making consequent changes to achieve better results. “Gaming the system” is just a blunt way of saying “optimization”.
The SEO industry grew because search algorithms are predictable, but constantly evolving. In general, developers and content producers don’t want to waste time trying to solve an ever changing puzzle, thus a market grew for specialized experts in the field.
Nowadays, social media marketing has stolen the spotlight from SEO. In my quest to avoid social media because of their overall detriment to society, I’ve handicapped myself getting some of my products noticed. However, the first steps of a product going viral is to be discovered in the first place. SEO and ASO are still necessary evils.
In this continuing series of articles, I will explore from the ground-up ASO (App Store Optimization), which is just SEO for Android’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. Using one of my apps, Simple Home Monitor, I’ll document my experiment to discover ASO from scratch. I’ll also analyse to what degree SEO and online marketing is a legitimate field of enterprise requiring expert knowledge or if it is mostly BS.
Until search engine algorithms have evolved to recognize good content from bad without relying on popularity as a leading indicator, SEO hacks will exist, and the majority of new and potentially great products will continue to go unrecognized, gathering dust in the corners of the Internet.
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