Organic search engine optimisation (SEO) plays a key role as a component of any organisation's overall Internet marketing strategy. How best to conceive and deploy SEO as part of a successful Internet presence in the future is a very important marketing question deserving of close attention.
SEO has been beset by image problems and a reputation tarnished by the 'all things to all people' snake-oil salesmen, as well as self-inflicted wounds attributable to the 'don't know what they're doing' brigade. Over the last couple of years it has slowly emerged from of the shadow of keyword-spammers and black hats, increasingly evolving into a highly specialised and professional field.
Trying to trick the search engines these days is pointless; the potential penalties and risk of delisting far outweigh any potential short-term gains. Good, ethical, forward thinking SEO is all about compliance and quality, not quantity. There are no spells, no fairy dust and no magic that can generate perfect SEO at the press of a button. As with too good to be true 'get rich quick schemes', the only thing that you can guarantee happening with any speed is that you'll lose your money (and often an amount of professional integrity into the bargain). If a website is compliant with search engine guidelines, contains high quality, regularly updated content and is linked to authoritative sites with topical relevance, then Google, Yahoo!, MSN and the other search engines will evaluate and accredit the website as being fit for its index. If your SEO is applied professionally and with insight and experience, it will most likely rank highly on those sites. A happy search engine is a happy searcher, is a happy SEO company is a (most importantly) happy client. Happiness abounds.
Internet users are now much more demanding, less forgiving and more sophisticated than in the past. They often know what they want and they want it now. Many can sense spam a mile away and will vote with their mouse if they feel they're being played or tricked. Who wants to waste their time, energy and money dealing with companies trying to get one over on you from the outset? Ethical SEO is appreciated by a far more technologically advanced audience, which responds positively to quality SEO. That positive response doesn't look likely to change any time soon.
Internet users want topicality and they want relevance. Astute search engines bend over backwards to deliver algorithms that cut out the rubbish and deliver relevant results. Astute SEO companies are wise to acknowledge those efforts and work to creatively comply with the engines' rules and regulations, delivering ethical SEO as part of a total web marketing package.
Considered and professionally applied SEO is and will remain a potent weapon in the acquisition of targeted traffic: target audience/semantic space overlap, smart clean programming, strategic keyword deployment, quality content, inbound links and compelling calls to action all contribute to relevance.
The major search engines are working hard to evolve their personalisation technology - personalisation in the context of specialist marketing niches, particularly local, media, links, social and video. As media delivery becomes richer and more diverse, so the SEO skills of web marketing will need to be applied through a wider range of channels. Matt Cutts of Google says, "Personalization is one of those things where, if you look down the road in a few years, having a search engine that is willing to give you better results because it can know a little bit more about what your interests are is a good thing". Signals generated by a history of what individual users have searched for in the past are increasingly used by Google to offer results that reflect and are relevant to each person's interests.
It seems clear that 'new' SEO such as social media optimisation, link bait, and the techniques used to naturally create a buzz, attract word of mouth visitors who will visit repeatedly, attract back links and lots of discussion and are representative of the personalisation concept. Localisation (offering different results for different countries) is also a component of personalisation and for a company planning to market internationally there will be SEO implications, both culturally and language-wise.
Other future developments are likely to be based on search and content delivery, with big opportunities for SEO consultancies to evolve into single 'all Internet services' providers. A company which can provide a comprehensive range of Internet services and niche specialisation even beyond traditional webdev/SEO/hosting, and in addition offer a range of niche tech requirements such as telecoms and IT services, will benefit enormously.
Emergent Web 2.0 and Mobile Web technologies offer opportunities for instant, on-demand search results and information retrieval. Technologies that will shape development standards and offer further website marketing require fresh ideas and approaches. The massive adoption of PDAs and handheld Internet devices will impact on the accessibility and compatibility of SEO solutions. With tens of millions of mobile devices likely to be sold worldwide every year, it will be come vital to make content easily accessible to in-car browsers, WebTV, Lynx browsers, Screenreaders and PDAs. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) based sites with strong ratios of content to code will enable screen readers and mobile browsers and devices to work more effectively through the HTML code. Search engines also like high content, clean CSS based sites.
XML feeds and other technologies like RSS (Really Simple Syndication / Rich Site Summary) syndicate summarised website content for third party aggregators and automatically flag fresh content for viewing. Web users, businesses and marketers are all drawn to such dynamic, proactive technologies and initiatives.
Irrespective of platform or medium, SEO will inevitably evolve and adapt in response to the dynamics of the Internet, all the time aspiring to deliver ever more reliable and relevant search results. As the search engines refine their processes, the opportunities to elicit competitive advantage through the traditional exploitation of engine algorithms will diminish, replaced by the far more exciting opportunities afforded by generating websites and content of exceptional worth delivered via new and innovative channels.
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