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Though many things have been altered,
expanded or otherwise modified, the general search
engine market share has not. Google remains the most
popular search engine and continues to drive more
traffic than the other search engines combined. Another
thing that has not changed is the greater volume of site
traffic generated by organic search placement over any
other form on online advertising.
There are six or seven advanced public
search engines out there but the vast majority of SEO
attention is naturally given to Google. Many of the tips
offered in this piece, while useful at the other search
engines, are written with Google in mind. We are also
thinking about alternative file formats and other ways
visitors might find websites aside from pure-search.
The most visible changes can be seen in
the variety of search formats and in search results
returned by the major search engines but the greatest
changes are taking place in the philosophies and
practices of search engine optimizers. As the search
environment has changed, so too have the techniques and
tools used by search marketers. More time is focused on
improving website content and navigation in order to
appeal both live-visitors and search spiders. There are
also new metrics measuring the success of a search
marketing campaign, all of which are far more
complicated than simple search engine rankings.
Since the introduction of the Jagger
Update at Google, we have been doing a number of things
slightly differently and have updated expectations of
our clients and ourselves.
Organic search engine placement now
requires a lot more work on our part and on the part of
our clients or their webmasters. Content needs to be
updated regularly, navigation simplified and shared
analysis of on-site traffic is increasingly important.
Top10 websites, especially around their main entry
points, have become production pieces requiring a
greater degree of strategic planning than the general,
annually updated brochure sites do. Creation of that
content needs to be considered a standing business
expense though that expense should be more than made up
for in long-term advertising savings.
Along with that greater effort, we
strongly advise our clients to integrate their PPC
campaigns with their SEO campaigns though, not
necessarily in the hands of the same person. SEO and PPC
are two unique arms of search engine marketing. Many
SEOs spread their time crafting both paid and organic
campaigns for clients though each requires unique and
highly developed skill sets. PPC offers guaranteed
placements for a fee but require greater attention and
monitoring, along with different levels of analysis. We
have set caps on the number of PPC campaigns we can run
in conjunction with organic placement campaigns and have
taken measures to outsource via recommendation any
overload. The key here is to have the PPC and the
organic SEO teams working together on several aspects of
the client's web documents.
That said, we need to stop thinking of search engines as
the main show in website marketing. This might sound
like a self-defeating statement coming from a search
engine optimization specialist however search, as a
tool, is no longer confined to the search engines as we
know them. Think about paid-ad generating site visits
from a third-party website. The transactions that
brought the visitors were not conducted on a search
engine, but one or more search engines, in conjunction
with that third-party website facilitated them.
Now, think about social commentary and
viral marketing. Internet users, as is true with most of
us offline, tend to rely on first-person
recommendations. I tell a friend about a service that
worked particularly well for me. They try that service
and tell their friends as well. It works that way with
almost any industry from restaurants to airlines, moving
companies and magazines. Now, try to imagine your
personal network of friends and contacts. How many of
them know each other or might connect through a third or
fourth party?
Imagine the impact of giving users the
ability to tag their search experience with comments.
During the Christmas sales rush, Yahoo Shopping
experimented with user-compiled shopping lists, sort of
a global gift-guide that used social networking and
comment tagging to cross-reference for search results.
(If you are interested in Stereo Speakers, you might
also be interested in StacyB's Audiophile Shopping
List.) Yahoo's Flickr photo sharing service has seen
amazing growth through global networks of friends
exchanging images they have tagged with their comments.
Similarly, the appearance of Blogs has
substantially expanded the online marketing environment.
It is estimated that by the year 2010, there might be as
many as one billion Blogs published online. While most
are personal diaries, blogs appear to have lasted long
enough to be more than a fad and are evolving rapidly as
users learn to modify and improve on them.
Businesses are increasingly turning to
Blogs to communicate with customers or to respond to
inquiries. Newsgathering organizations are using Blogs
to fill the gap between TV broadcast and the Internet by
posting everything from breaking news, information
podcasts, video clips, and reporters notebooks to recipe
ideas, shopping tips and paid-search advertising.
There are two major advantages Blogs
offer search marketers. The ability to link Blog entries
together to form an information-thread network provides
search marketers with a number of tools beyond the
improvement of the knowledge base. We are able to help
clients establish communications centers from which they
can link to information supplied by suppliers,
distributors and clients on their websites or blogs. An
important goal for search marketers is to help our
clients provide users with a clear path to information
they need. Clear paths tend to get followed by many
people, a trait today's search spiders look and account
for. Blogs, if maintained properly can be an important
component in a winning website structure. The second
important feature of Blogs is RSS, real simple
syndication. Anyone who expresses interest can subscribe
to your blog, getting instant notification of updates or
messages.
Search is going to be a facet of all
information applications and many electronic appliances
moving forward into the next decade. The major search
engines are each working to make deals with the major
appliance and electronics manufacturers in order to
provide search results to users in planes, trains and
all automobiles, along with your kitchen, living room,
mobile phone and quite possibly to display screens
appearing in shopping carts.
In other words, search will be a greater
part of our daily lives, which brings us back to search
engine optimization for websites. That's still
important, even if the traditional search engine
rankings pages are less important.
Building a good website structure is
critical. Search engines have changed radically over the
past ten years to the point that we are now in a period
of what appears to be constant change and evolution. The
most important elements of SEO today, more important
than writing the perfect keyword enriched title tag, are
ease of navigation, clarity of purpose, and relevant
links (think of links as information-threads). Keywords
are important, make no mistake about that but search
engines have moved far beyond simple keyword/context
measurements.
Search engines have significantly
improved their ranking algorithms over the past two
years and in particularly, the past few months. From the
earliest years until about five years ago, search
engines looked for keywords in several areas or elements
of a website, including incoming and outgoing links.
Rankings were determined by the arrangement of keywords
and the number of incidents of those keywords found on
or around the site.
For the past five years, Google has set
the standards SEOs work to achieve but over the last six
months, those standards have subtly changed and will
continue to change long into the foreseeable future.
What made Google different five years ago was their
method of using a standard keyword based spider that
also factored in the number of incoming links to each
site. That led to a number of techniques based around
making artificial link-densities by creating
link-networks, portal sites and other tricks aimed at
gaming Google. After a series of algorithm updates aimed
primarily at preventing "black-hat" manipulation of its
rankings, Google has moved well past the basic premise
of PageRank and its simple, democratic explanation.
We believe the Jagger Update is only one
of many algorithm shifts that are leading Google away
from pure link-context to include shared incidents of
semantic intention found between linked documents.
Where we used to look at a website as a
collection of similar documents, often of a common file
type, found within a distinct URL, we are now examining
far more complex layers of differing web-documents
strung between several URLs. Again, think of links
between documents as information threads being followed
by the spiders. As much as possible, these threads
should be more than useful links between relevant sites,
they should help complete whatever story the live-user
is experiencing. Your site visitors are looking for
something, at least, that's what Google, Yahoo and the
rest want to think. Google is especially interested in
how visitors use your site, how often they return and
how often they use links leaving your site.
Google has just reopened Google Analytics
on a limited, invitation basis. Overwhelmed by massive
user-interest when it released its modified Urchin
site-statistics program, Google Analytics provides a
detailed look at how visitors use your site. We are
strongly urging clients to sign up for Google Analytics
as it becomes available and will be offering assistance
interpreting data extracted. One of the features of the
free software package is the integration of
AdWords/AdSense support showing how your ad campaigns
are performing and how ads displayed on your site are
doing.
While Google is making it easier for
search marketers and advertisers, its goal is obviously
to make itself more money by increasing click-through
rates while collecting user data from the millions of
websites signing up with the service. It has also
provided SEOs with a dashboard view of critical factors
involved with how it ranks sites.
The practice of search engine
optimization has in some ways become more difficult but
in others, has actually gotten easier. SEO has come a
log way since its early days in the mid 1990's. A decade
ago, SEOs were considered secretive and manipulative
cowboys, roughneck mercenaries who would (because they
could) do just about anything to get a site ranked in
the Top10 on the major engines of the time. There were
more search engines along with a variety of directories,
spidered databases such as Inktomi that sold results to
other engines.
This switch, combined with the rapid
growth of the Web necessitated better search algorithms
and a crackdown on manipulative search marketers. At the
same time, the SEO and SEM sectors have seen tremendous
growth due mostly to a shift towards paid-search
marketing by major advertisers and the attendant growth
of interest in Google, Yahoo and MSN. The search
marketing sector has doubled or perhaps tripled in size
in just twenty-four months as new practitioners were
hired by established SEO firms or forming their own
businesses. Many of those new practitioners have spent
that time absorbing and adding to the huge volume of
information that makes up the SEO sector's knowledge
base.
Those SEOs are coming of age,
professionally speaking, and are very good at what they
do. Their skills are going to be an important asset to
the sector in the coming year as the business of search
expands way beyond the desktop and into everyday life.
Change is good.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager
of StepForth Search
Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada,
StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt
Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix
Creative Works, and has provided professional search
engine placement and management services since 1997.
http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel - 250-385-1190 Toll
Free - 877-385-5526 Fax - 250-385-1198
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