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.
16 Responses to “The Future of SEO”
You left out that Google owns the largest feed distribution channel and (one of or THE) largest RSS reader. You also should have mentioned that by owning Youtube, they learn a lot about true viral content and probably most importantly, IMHO, you didn’t mention the fact that a large, LARGE portion of internet users have a toolbar installed.
By Rae on Nov 2, 2008
You should also look into Semantic web technology. Although it is only in its infancy right now, it can significantly improve targeting. SEOs would have to help clients understand meaning and intent in order to compete in search engine rankings. Interesting list or overview of what’s on the horizon.
By Allan on Nov 2, 2008
Jordan,
I agree tomorrow’s SEOs will need to be aware of all the possibilities and facets of SEO..
my take on it.. the SEOs of today will become the digitalPR and digital marketing strategists of tomorrow because with good analytics almost every touch point of a business can show weakness and an area of improvement that can be tweaked and confirmed with good analytics.. as long as SEOs in the future are doing good measurement frequently and advising their cusomters on the changes that need to be made, then we will always have jobs and happy clients…
=)
By paisley on Nov 3, 2008
I like the list… funny thing how this has been getting some play once more (future of SEO) - for a while there we were in the ‘SEO is Dead’ - ‘Rankings don’t matter’ phase inthe industry of late and now finding there are plenty of new angles to approach things from.
One thing I’d probably add is page segmentation. While early systems were more about identifying topic focus shifts on a given page, I can see it being very useful in valuating links as well.
We know how G loves links and editorial ones best, page segmentation algorithms would be a serious bonus for them and a concern for the SEO industry… (crap links get devalued even further)
By Dave on Nov 3, 2008
I really like this article Jordan.
In my opinion the future of SEO all comes down to one thing, which you make reference to - quality content.
So much more of SEO in the future (and even now we’re seeing it) is going to be about brainstorming ideas for on-site content and coming up with ways to market it, rather than looking for quick and easy ways to get links.
Google need to come up with a much better way of getting ’social input’ than simple Digg style voting. I love Digg and use it frequently to market my content and just for fun, but if Google did something similar, it could prove a costly mistake.
By Thomas Baugh on Nov 3, 2008
You have some interesting concepts. You may want to take a look at an article that I wrote Search Engine Optimization - Evolution or Extinction? over on Aaron Wall’s blog.
By Jeremy Knauff on Nov 3, 2008
That Google “Digg-like” voting system is in Beta and might never get released to the public, much like the shopping / organic beta program they’ve been experimenting with since ‘06.
The audio bit is a bit interesting…
finn
By nat finn on Nov 3, 2008
Great article. Great resources. I love the Google Audio indexing tool.
By Russ on Nov 3, 2008
SEO is not dying, it’s evolving, we just need to keep up with the latest trends, technologies and most importantly user’s behavior on the Internet.
By Best SEO Practices on Nov 4, 2008
I believe in the future more blogs will be made dofollow. This is the new path we will follow. To reward posters of comments and thus create a collaborative community.
By seobro on Nov 4, 2008
It is true that as search engines change, Search engine optimization will evolve as well. This has been happening for a while now. SEO has a future unless a very radical revolutionary change in SE algorithm occurs, which is not likely in the next 15 years or so.
By Internet Entrepreneur on Nov 6, 2008