The Future of SEO
November 2, 2008 – 8:29 pm
By Jordan Kasteler (Utah SEO Pro)
Search engines are getting smarter day by day, technologies are advancing minute by minute, and search engine optimization specialists need to get on board and prepare for the future of SEO.
While many traditional SEO tactics and strategies may always hold true, creativity and ingenuity is needed to master the newest formulating technologies being developed now.
Let’s take a brief look at some of the upcoming technologies and explore possibly ways Internet marketers can and will be taking advantage of these.
User Behavior Data & Personalization
Google offers many services that collect our data, surfing habits, and search behavior like:
- Google Analytics
- Google Desktop
- Gmail
- Google Toolbar
- Google Chrome
- GOOG-411
- Bookmarks
- FeedBurner
- Google RSS Reader (thanks Sugarrae)
- Etc
With this data they can provide “more relevant” results to searchers by analyzing how people behave with the content provided to determine it’s adequacy and by personalizing the search results for users with behavior patterns.
Microsoft recently filed a patent about BrowseRank, a PageRank competitor, to determine content relevance and adequacy by measuring a users behavior and engagement with the content. Some of the things they desire to measure are:
- Bounce Rate
- Time Spent
- Click behavior
- etc
With this data they can determine if content is actually valuable to a user by seeing how they interact with it rather than just basing it’s authority off links.
How this will change SEO and Internet marketing:
Internet marketers will have to start creating more compelling and engaging content that causes users to bookmark, share, read, interact, or anything to make the content sticky. This won’t eradicate heavy link building and on-page optimization but will dampen the importance of it.
Black Hat SEOs will likely want to automate bot behavior from various IPs to falsify massive visitor traffic engaging in content to fool the data metrics.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Scanning
Google recently announced that they can now recognize the content of imaged scanned documents. As Matt McGee points out, a search for repair aluminum wiring in Google equates to a number one listing of an OCR scanned document.
How this will change SEO and Internet marketing:
SEOs can now scan hard copy books, letters, documents, etc for fresh unique content. This makes for a much easier process of getting content online.
The downside is that you can’t semantically markup your content to place relevance on certain areas so it is still preferred to create an HTML version.
Visual Identification
More and more image search sites are gaining capabilities of facial recognition by vector point analysis and color hue.
VideoSurf, a new video search engine, conducts its searches based on visual identification rather than strictly text or meta-data.
How this will change SEO and Internet marketing:
Internet marketers will have to be more cognitive of the content of the images and video than the actual meta-data, tags, titles, and descriptions they embed and/or apply to it.
It will be harder for black hat SEOs to get away with labeling false tags on a video in order for it to appear in the search results for that keyword.
Speech Recognition
YouTube, for the political channel, rolled out speech recognition capabilities, called Google Audio Indexing, which allows users to find keywords in politician’s video speeches. This is only the beginning for this technology, soon users will be able to search for keywords and mentions within all video.
How this will change SEO and Internet marketing:
Search Engine Land touched a bit on it already here, but Internet marketers will be forced to put much more stock into the audio content of their videos. Audio indexing combined with visual identification will vastly change the game of Video SEO.
Social Input
Social input and voting will be used by search engines to allow the Internet community to have human editorial voice in the quality of content. Google has already experimented with this with a Digg-like voting system in search result pages.
How this will change SEO and Internet marketing:
Internet marketers will call out their voting rings to figure out ways to get people to vote for their search results in a natural way much like what’s already being done to game social news sites like Reddit and Digg.
Black hat spam may still fool bots but human discretion can be a major red flag for it.
Summary
Don’t be late on the bandwagon for marketing and making these technologies lucrative for you. Brainstorm how you want to take advantage now and in the future.