SEO Trends – I’ve noticed a trend in the SEO community where an increasing number of bloggers are again predicting the end of search engine optimization. Several of these people are very high profile and I should think they would know better. Such pronouncements reveal a very naive attitude about search engine optimization.
I’ll discuss a few of their concerns about the future of SEO and you’ll see why they don’t need to be that concerned.
SEO Trend – Personalized Search – A lot of search engine optimization specialists have bemoaned the advent of personalized search and search history. After three years of personalized search I have yet to see any significant decline in the value of organic SEO practices associated with personalized search.
People act like the Bogeyman will magically adjust the search results of anyone who logs in to Google. Suddenly, you lose all search visibility because someone has personalized search active? I don’t think so. Even if they are unwittingly adjusting one query, there are still plenty of others where your content shows up — unless, of course, you’re relying on your link anchor text to optimize for search.
SEO Trend – Universal Search – Some good points have been made about Universal Search throwing everything but organic Web search results at Google’s users lately. Other search engines have not abused Universal Search as much as Google has but the perception in the community is that Google is making life harder for everyone.
Okay, so anyone optimizing organic search for clients who have to contend with Local Search/Maps listings being placed at the top of the page should be able to figure out how to get a client page to rank in Local Search. You register the site with Google, pick your categories, and optimize your description. Local Search/Maps Search is nothing more than a return to Directory Optimization. Most of you may not have done this before but I have. To be honest, I thought my days of directory submissions were over, but Google, Live, and Yahoo! have found a way to make it important again.
Big deal.
Are you concerned about Video Search? The old directory optimization techniques (combined with some strategic linkage) seem to work just fine for that, too.
Blogsearch and News Search are the real problem areas for Universal Search conspiracy theorists.
SEO Trend – Social Media Killed My Rankings – Frankly, I’ve never placed as much value in actual targeted keyword rankings as most of you. Xenite.Org targets between 200 and 300 expressions so don’t get me wrong. I’ve done it. It’s just that you always get more traffic from untargeted expressions than for targeted expressions with a content-rich site.
But as more SEOs invest their time and resources into building social media they find they are losing ground in the organic search results. Or maybe they don’t find it but it’s happening anyway. Why? Because if you don’t increase your relevant search referral traffic every month you’re not optimizing for search. You cannot realistically grow a Web site’s search referral traffic by adding more targeted keyword expressions. You keep invading new competitive query spaces and you’ll quickly stretch your resources so thin you cannot compete.
You have to think around the keywords that people are competing for. If you optimize a page for “poker rooms” you’d better be including a lot of copy for the other expressions related to poker rooms.
I mean, I can optimize poker rooms until I’m blue in the face but I’m pretty sure the people competing for poker rooms point as many links at their sites as they can. If I want some poker room traffic I’m going to have to write about midwest poker rooms, poker rooms in ga, year old poker rooms, poker rooms in the world, poker rooms in phoenix, poker rooms you never heard of, and how to design a good poker room, or what goes into a poker room, or why a poker room is always dark around the corners.
Poker room optimization can beat the tar out of optimization for poker room secondary expressions because people look at all the traffic going for “poker rooms” and the fact there isn’t any traffic going for “poker rooms in nh” and they think, “Wow! I have to compete for “poker rooms” and “online poker rooms” because that’s where all the traffic is.
Yeah — well, that’s also where all the automated rank-checking traffic is, too. But that’s another story.
My point is that if you’re worried about the future of SEO because keyword optimization seems to be getting more difficult, you should take it to the next level. Now is the time for you to start optimizing for query spaces (a query space consists of all the queries and content that are relevant to a specific topic). A typical well-developed query space can have hundreds of related queries. You might be surprised to learn how many so-called “competitive” queries have relatively little content competing for them.
The Future of SEO – As long as there is search, there will always be search engine optimization. It doesn’t matter how people search ten years from now. People will find a way to influence those search results — including the search engineers and the searchers. The future of SEO looks bright because there is a lot of future SEO work to be done for search engine optimization. You cannot move into the future, however, if you insist on living in the past.
You can beat up on yourself and say there is no future to SEO because your links keep dying, but all that really means is that your search engine optimization is based on outdated techniques. The future of SEO technician education lies in opening people’s minds up to the broader possibilities. The SEO of the future will have to look at the big picture because the little pictures will be meaningless.
We don’t need to fuss over keyword-based rankings. We need to build upon and improve the search referral traffic we obtain, the conversions we achieve, and the breadth of our overall visibility.
I was reading a blog today where the SEO technician mentioned moving from an agency to an in-house position and only upon taking that in-house position did the SEO learn that you have to focus on return-on-investment. Frankly, in my opinion, return on investment and conversions is all any SEO technician should ever be concerned with.
At least until we come up with a better metric, but that lies in the future of SEO.
SEO is our future because we’ll always be searching for something. Many of us may leave the field of professional search engine optimization but as long as we use search engines we’ll be optimizing search one way or another.
Search engines just may not always look the way they do. We have to change with the technology, not give up and play dead. Moving forward, adapting to new possibilities — that’s an age-old SEO Trend that will shape the future of SEO.
I guarantee it.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
tom 02.06.09 at 9:08 am
We surveyed marketers and SEOs a few months back on “What are the top 3 reasons that stop businesses from going forward with SEO?”
Oddly enough, several said “It’s difficult to tie SEO dollars to ROI.” So, I totally agree that ROI and conversion is the goal of SEO, but somehow there’s a group of SEO people out there who didn’t get that memo. In my view, it’s never been easier to tie SEO dollars to ROI.
Michael Martinez 02.06.09 at 10:16 am
I definitely think the message is not being clearly articulated by the community. It’s important that people capture baseline data. If search engine optimization is all about building converting traffic, you should be able to show a correlation between growth in sales and growth in search referrals and therefore a correlation between growth in search referrals and the effort made to optimize for search.
If the client withholds relevant data, they either don’t understand the metric or they are just not interested in building their business. You can work with them to understand a metric. You cannot do anything about self-defeating attitudes except find other clients.
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