The Future of SEO: It's About Search, Not the Search Engine
Until recently, search engine optimization consisted of concentrating on how a website ranks in all the big search engines. Now the game has changed and traditional SEO is a thing of the past, according to a recent article in SitePro News by Jim Hedger. It claims the old ways of SEO are being pushed aside as the popularity of searching on social media sites is becoming the new means of search.
People are no longer using the main search engines to locate the information they seek. They are turning to social media, social bookmarking sites, RSS feed-readers, specific vertical search tools, and multimedia. Both large and small corporations have created profiles on MySpace, groups on Facebook and lenses on Squidoo. Of course, traditional SEO techniques are used in these socials media sites to insure that people can find the information you want them to find about your company.
Likewise, the whole element of reputation management goes along with a company's involvement in social media. Search engines are turning into a reputation management system. You may not be able to control the negative articles written about your company, but the more positive articles your company can distribute through social media sites, the better off they will be. With this comes the fact that SEO firms must be able to manage what is said about their client, both positive and negative, in every media form possible.
As the search engines begin to reach out to social media, they have also introduced their own extension called Personalized Search. Personalized search can basically be summed up as an SEO's worst nightmare, because individual search results are reordered based on the searcher's previous search behavior, their home page content, bookmarks, search history, web history and so on. This will have a large impact on keyword analysis since one company could be the #3 result for one searcher and the #11 for another. SEO firms must be willing to adapt quickly as this change is happening now.
In his article, Hedger points out that placing calls to action leading to social or browser based bookmarking and building smarter link/tag networks, along with the traditional SEO tactics, will be the key to optimizing personalized search. So, for all of the companies out there who have not yet gotten involved in social bookmarking, start now.
With this growth of social media, companies will have to rely on the expertise of SEO firms that offer all of the above services as more and more people will turn to these social media sites for information and more engines will offer the dreaded personalized search. Because as we have learned today, the information seeker will always be interested in search, but won't always be interested in the traditional search engines as their preferred means of search.
