January 27, 2010 Why SEO and where are we heading?
For those who know merely nothing about SEO, but also for professionals already doing it, it doesn't hurt to remember the importance of good ranking on search engines.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization is a relatively new activity on the Romanian market. Yes, it is true that any designer or web developer knows what optimization is and puts 2-3 words together for the title pages to consider it done. The client is obviously happy about it, but why isn't my site ranking well? The answer is simple, just because this type of optimization doesn't quite cut it anymore on an online market becoming more and more competitive.
In the recent past things were quite clear and simple for an SEO consultant. The recipe, even if not very accurate (no one knows the exact algorithm of search engines), seemed to have some very clear steps and obviously it worked. This recipe is still valid today but these steps are just not enough anymore for an ambitious company that want to build a brand and not just a niche entity. The recipe is this:
OnSite SEO + OffSite SEO = Google love
Onsite SEO means prepping your site for search engines. You first start by analyzing the competition and the keywords, then move to customizing and adapting each of the site's pages according to the selected keywords, you include them in the title, description, headings, internal link structure, get a good density for those keywords and so on.
Offsite SEO refers mainly to link building, a very simple and common sense concept that unfortunately becomes costly when considering the resources: time, money and work, so basically money. How do we build links? We have several options, the most slow and painful is to look for possible partners over the internet, contact their webmasters and engage in a short-long process of negotiation. We can submit the site to directories, exchange links, find affiliate networks, article and press release writing etc. External links can also come naturally when you have very high quality content. We all hope to that, but reality shows that not all ideas are that good.
However the recipe we were speaking about is in a continuous change. Search engines constantly develop and try to improve considerably the user experience, in order to keep them as faithful clients. The same principle we use inside our company, Freshbyte, more specifically: quality creates fidelity.
If we try to analyze the latest tendencies, the inevitable question occurs: how will SEO change? Let's have a look at the most recent changes. Search engines constantly develop ways to personalize searches based on query logs and clickthrough maps. With personalization our browsing experience is improved (this is still questionable), but our job as optimization consultants has become a little more difficult, as we do not have control over what the user receives and the site's rank after a search. If for example we are logged on the Google account you can notice this especially with frequent searches. We will no longer know exactly which rank will the site have for user X or Y.
Another tendency in the development of the web is the semantic web, or to be more accurate the contextual web. This means that for a search, in the results we receive we'll find websites optimized also for the synonyms if the query phrase. The immediate consequence of this fact: for a website the competition increases even more. The phrase or keyword we chose to optimize for looses its advantage or relevance in from of the ones with the same meaning but different shape.
We'll take into discussion also the social aspect of the web, the need for social networking (I often wonder how social can we actually get until we get tired of it?), which is highly appreciated by both search engines and users. Google wants to change the ranking of search result according to the most recent pieces of information, Twitter will be indexed in real-time and searches will include result from this environment. Facebook has changed their privacy policy in order to stimulate the indexing of Facebook pages by search engines, a thing that might attract even more businesses to this channel. Social networking, bookmarking, photo or rich media sites are expanding and becoming an evergreen resource for SEO as well.
The challenge of all professionals in this field is to anticipate all important development, adapt quickly and move in the same rhythm as them.
