Here’s something painfully obvious – it almost feels weird to type it: “SEOs and search marketers need to pay more attention than ever before and step up their game.” Yes, I am the master of the obvious. But I’m also telling the truth – we’re being counted on by our bosses and clients more than ever. We’re being squeezed to produce more than we used to. In some cases, we’re the last chance a faltering business has! We’re getting worked hard.
This morning I was reading some threads on how an SEO role is not the cushy job it used to be. (Frankly, I never found it to be cushy; I typically had clients or employers who were pretty in touch with marketing and very, very demanding. I’m thankful for that – it kept me sharp and kept my head in the game.) The “indispensable” aura has evaporated quite a bit since SEO has gone mainstream. SEO may have different definitions across the board depending on who you ask, but it seems like everyone and their mother knows something about it today. But it’s not all gloom and doom – there’s a silver lining here. This is really a good thing for full time SEOs.
Look – all things must mature. All industries must evolve. That’s a fact of life, and it’s amazing when industries forget that (music industry… I’m looking at you!!!). When you get too comfortable, you get surpassed. I would argue that at this point in time most business sites built in the last 3 years are SEO optimized to some degree. A few years ago finding a site that did not adhere to search engine spider capabilities was a cinch. See, once upon a time there was a huge translation loss between the creative and the technical builders, but those lines have blurred. Today many designers/developers are adept in the fundamentals of SEO. And if the site’s not optimized at all (maybe due to a novice designer without the first clue of title tags or a uniquely creative Flash architecture), it’s still much less likely today that a search engines is failing with your site. Search engines know that it is their burden to learn how to read even the most abysmal sites, especially if they want to be known as the most relevant search engine. Why? Because even sometimes the most painful, brutal, technically horrible sites are the most relevant contextually.
Today engines are learning Flash. Google’s been improving their JavaScript comprehension. URLs with heavy parameters aren’t the issue they were. Even duplicate content is handled pretty well for the most part. Google can spider more than 100 links per page (the old rule of thumb) – in fact, overall spider efficiency is way up. I don’t believe it’s a top issue where content is located in the source code anymore. Engines can even figure out when to treat a 302 redirect as 301 redirect. I truly believe engines are spending their processing reading and thinking deeper about the context of a page way more than managing technical obstacles. SEO is continually becoming less of a technical concentration, and so much more of a marketing channel than ever before. Search engineers know all the SEO tricks, and would prefer to serve relevant pages on their terms… and not by the influence of an SEO. It’s painfully obvious that they’re going to feed this into their algorithms and roadmaps.
So what do engines want? They want a user value! What should we give them in this tougher, rougher economic climate? User value! Today SEO isn’t just about algorithms – it’s probably more about the experience from the search engine result pages to the site’s conversion or goal. SEO is an art form. SEO is philosophy. And when you start practicing SEO marketing and focus on context and authority, the logic of optimization seems clearer.
Here’s an example. Years ago there were questions around title tag construction. What should go first, what should go second, etc. The feeling was that the keywords you were optimizing should be closer to the beginning of the title tag. If you wanted to post your company name, that should go at the end. If it didn’t show up in the SERPs (because it was truncated), that was a trade-off for “real” SEO. I followed that rule of thumb once upon a time. But think about it. Search engineers certainly knew that SEOs and webmasters were doing that, and maybe rightfully so. Would it make sense for them to keep that in place today, especially considering how powerful their inherent processing is? Wouldn’t an engine rather serve a page that had contextually relevant titles for user value? Of course! Should Amazon.com suffer because they’re putting their name first in the title? No – that’s insane. In this case Amazon is a huge name, and it behooves searchers to know immediately that the Amazon listing is indeed Amazon.com. If you’re constructing title tags for your unknown site and are less concerned about branding, then maybe it is fitting to put the website or company name in the back. Unlike before, there’s no hard and fast rule. It just doesn’t make sense anymore. And will make even less sense in the future.
SEOs really need to get into the groove of marketing. Optimize for search engines on behalf of the users. I say that so much I sound like a broken record. This is paramount, though – in fact, I argue it should be followed (not preceded) by a basic site audit in most cases. If your content is good, it is more than likely that engines will find it.
