NewRedBook – The Nick Garner Blog

Noisy, but quiet at the same time

I get asked what is going on in SEO and where I think it’s is going and I have 2 sets of answers:

On whats going on?

Not that much if you are just a regular SEOer working on pimping your property. The tricks don’t seem to have changed that much over the last 3 years. There are no big new exploits to play on, its all just settled down and rolling along.

This is evidenced by looking on the SEO social bookmarking site Sphinn.com – lots of recycled stuff about core SEO housekeeping, but nothing really that new.

The new stuff is with Social, but from an SEO view, the only interesting thing here is how Google is leveraging social to connect the whole of the Internet as one giant social network. That’s cool, but not relevant if you are looking to punt out mortgage applications!

Where SEO is going?

1. Its here to stay and its becoming more and more important as the Internet becomes  more ‘socalised’ i.e. as web sites who care about traffic conform to certain architectural practices; These practices revolve around being index-able and bookmark-able.

2. Its dying slowly as the engines get better and better at holding out against manipulation from SEO’ers like me.

Of course this is ‘onsite’ versus ‘offsite’ classification of things.

I am lucky to manage a reasonably large SEO operation and I have access to stats across my SEO work and my colleague’s PPC activities. I’ve seen a slow and progressive shift towards users getting more comfortable with clicking the paid for ad, as opposed to the natural search listing when they are doing a commercial query.

Of course this all makes sense when you see the huge push on quality of advertising. Google know when users don’t really discriminate between paid and natural, they will have won the battle.

By the same measure, I’m seeing fewer commercial results within the informational queries.  This has a bunch of consequences, the greatest being a shift of money towards paid for as the easiest pathway to buying a product when you are ready!

So in conclusion, for as long as techies build sites in ignorance of the web ecosystem, SEO’ers will carry on patching up the damage. But Gaming the system for rankings will get a lot harder and will gently roll into online PR.