As the web itself is changing so is the world of SEO and what optimizers and webmasters who are interested in remaining current should be keeping their eye on. There are now three very important trends developing which will seriously impact on the way SEO is done in the near future.
A recent piece I wrote for Journalism.co.uk drew quite some reaction not to mention about 200 emails which came through HelpMySEO on the subject which indicates perhaps that somewhere a raw nerve was touched. Now, I have written on the ability of writers and authors to affect SEO gains here before so the issue when it comes to journalism and SEO has less to do with ability and more to do with ideology and politics.
As I am writing this SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website on Google’s #1 page is riding high on the Amazon best-seller charts for books on SEO and Internet Marketing, on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s at the No 42 position in the UK and No 48 for the US which provides consistency and, from an author’s point of view, a certain sense of achievement.
As I am writing this my book, SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google’s #1 page is riding high on the Amazon.co.uk best seller charts at the number 17 slot which is great (plus the highest it’s risen since it first came out in January this year).
There is a fundamental difference between SEO and SEM. The former consists of crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s in an attempt to optimise a site to the point that it is search engine friendly (while being careful not to over-optimise it as that will then count against it) while the latter involves online marketing techniques which take into account viral social networks (like YouTube and FaceBook) the users of which are then utilised as inevitable assistant marketers.
I was reading a report in boingboing that was slightly nostalgic in outlook to those early Web 1.0 days when the web was more about personal sites than commercial ones and it made me think.
I have been active on the web since its very early days when a distinction still existed between the internet and the world wide web and when actually entering a site was an event in its own right. It is easy to forget how far we have come and how fast so it’s good to note that those old hackneyed and ever-so-innocent sites made with a lot of passion and a certain amount of dreams were also incredibly search engine friendly.
You are wondering right now how the latest privacy wars amongst the big search engines are going to allow you to take advantage and make the most of your SEO efforts.
Make no mistake, anything which involves policy changes or competitive actions amongst the big search engines (and we are talking really Google, Yahoo! and MSN in that order) is going to affect online search behaviour and SEO work.
