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The Changing Face of Search Engine Optimization
by Bobby Heard
With the ever evolving internet market for just about anything
you can imagine and Google’s index growing to almost 9
billion pages, and counting, there is little dispute amongst
search engine optimizers that our job is getting much harder.
From linking to articles, and density to ontology, our industry
changes as fast as any other. The search engines, especially
Google, seem to be on a daily diet of change and their algorithm
seems to be growing at the rate of their index.
The word ‘related’ plays a much bigger part in SEO
today than it ever has in the past. Instead of targeting an
exact keyword phrase, it now makes a lot more sense to keep
your site within context and to have related words to your keywords,
compared to having density of one keyword phrase. Linking has
also turned into a frenzy for relevancy. Unrelated links seem
to no longer carry much weight at all. The theme through all
of Google’s recent changes seems to come down to one cliché:
quality over quantity.
Just like with any other update at Google, optimizers must search
and research their profession, however it seems to be happening
more often than ever. You can’t walk through our office
without hearing Google’s name a thousand times. We have
unofficial RND (research and development) meetings almost every
hour as there seems to constantly be new ideas and theories
popping into all of our heads. In the past there were always
changes to the way we’ve done our work, but the pace of
this change is accelerating rapidly as well as the competition
for online searchers.
MSN seems to be creating a buzz and they’ve just recently
started a national television ad campaign. Their search results
resemble Google’s of 6 months ago, a time that will go
down in SEO history as “the good old days”, and also
a time that Google’s SERPs seemed a lot more relevant than
they do today. New search engines seem to be popping up all
over the place, and after all, wasn’t Google a virtual
unknown 5 years ago?
One of the best points made to me over the past month came at
the preview of the new become.com search engine in California,
where founder Michael Yang decreed this to be only the very
beginning in the history of online search. Whatever happens
in Google’s future, and the future of online search, there
is one thing for certain: only the most intelligent and innovative
of SEO companies are going to stay above the bar and continue
to find ways to get their clients, and themselves, to the top.
About the Author
Bobby Heard (bheard@abalone.ca) is the Vice-President of Abalone
Designs (http://www.abalone.ca), which offers great SEO results
at affordable prices. |
