I took a moment this morning to reflect on all the changes that have occurred over the past few years in the things I do everyday as an SEO. In an industry that never stands still, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the work we do to promote good search engine rankings has evolved so much in a short time. More and more, I’m realizing that the work I do with SEO involves every bit as much marketing know-how as the traditional firms that occupy Madison Avenue.
Look at the “major” developments in search in recent memory. One of the most notable has been the push towards earned, authoritative links as the main value determinant in organic rankings. Only the sites that attain the status of invaluable authorities in their markets will survive. Truly, you must provide value to your visitors, which may include any combination of guides, tools, how-to’s, blogs, UGC, and user participation on your site. What is it that sets you apart? How can you create word-of-mouth, or better, word-of-links? For an SEO, that’s a long way away from grabbing juicy anchor text links from a few related websites.
I personally started out doing SEO in the ticket broker industry in 2002-03. To be tops in Google, it simply required constant emailing and link buying on sports fans’ websites, area-specific websites (You got a St. Louis gardening website? Let me buy a Cardinals Tickets link for $10/month), and the like. I can assure you that “tickets” is one of the top 10 or 15 most competitive SERPs in Google, but all it took to beat out everyone else was being a step ahead as far as link acquisition and minor tweaks in anchor text went. At one point in time we had the top 6 websites in Google for “cubs tickets.” Can you imagine what it would take to get that today?
In 2007, I am now concerned with our users more than ever. I am compelled to blog incessantly and reach out to other blogs/sites within the “conversation.” I submit more to PRWeb, MarketWire, and all their buddies in a month now than I used to in a year. The St. Louis gardening link means nothing to me – I only want to create an article that is baity enough to grab the attention (links) of 40 related websites, or snag one of my sites a mention in the New York Times.
Today, you have to have a selling point, a brand name, and a value that goes beyond a website that can show up highly in the SERPs. Without that, the long term prospects for your web property are zilch. I say SEO is more like traditional marketing every day because it’s not a game with the search engines as much as it is a game with your competitors and the buzz floating about your industry. Your sole “value” can’t be in your search rankings, but rather in your position with relation to others in your industry as far as the services you provide.
My SEO tasks for the week? Launching a contest for the best photos submitted by our users on one site, bringing together contacts for an article on recent customers for another, and developing a program to provide free web hosting and support for a non-for-profit organization. And yes, the blogging. I say, that’s Madison Avenue stuff (with a web flair to it, of course), not the work of a link ninja.
It’s cool because it’s all part of a logical progression in the way that search engines determine rankings, and also because it allows those of us who used to be quite limited in what we performed on a daily basis to branch out and be creative. SEO catch phrases like “Write for people, not the search engines,” “Get links for traffic, not search benefit,” and “Content is king” may make you want to vomit by now, but they should not be ignored. They are simply the most grounded principles in what can push you as an SEO to continue to compete as the times change.
There isn’t any sign of things slowing down either. Personalized search (if it takes off) would force us to progress even further, requiring once-lowly link buyers to observe trends in the search history and site visits of not only their current visitors, but also those most likely to become site visitors in the future. I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet, but on marches the exciting progress of search marketing – straight down Madison Avenue.
