The following is a guest post by Jeremiah Lewis. He works as an SEO for an internet marketing firm in Los Angeles California. He also maintains Fringe, a blog devoted to writing, film and entertainment, and life.
With the current debate over Links Versus Content, people are once again asking what works to gain the most visitors, the most attention. While creating content is obviously the only way a search engine can find you, creating focused content is even more effective.
What about linking? If content is the bread of the internet, links are the butter. If those links are relevant and natural (or natural looking), the benefits are outstanding. But what if linking is merely the tip of the iceberg? The SEO landscape looks ripe for change, but just as the search engines are evolving at an ever-growing pace, that which is being searched is also evolving--mutating form, function, and execution almost right before our eyes.
There are five major changes on the way in the online world, which quite simply will revise, refine, and revolutionize our understanding and approach to search engine optimization. Actually, what we call SEO will become a subset of the larger world of search engine usability--no longer will SEO be solely the purview of SEO experts. Normal, everyday users will have more of a hand in shaping the way data is found than ever before.
The following five things are due to disrupt and alter the way in which optimization and interaction are applied.
#1. NGT (Next Generation Tagging) - Imagine objects within video and audio able to be organically and dynamically tagged by parsers directly connected to search engines. Imagine products tagged not only by text but by interactive, dynamic multimedia, which is fed and organized through these parsing agents. Utilizing microformats, hybrid peer-to-peer networking, and new content distribution models, the next movement in tagging is full-embedded content awareness.
#2. ACG (Automated Content Generation) - No, I'm not talking about spam generators, though that will remain part of the search engine equation. ACG in this case refers to content that is pushed through the pipes and passageways of feed servers and mashup generators to become reshaped content. Utilizing massive "rainbow" libraries, content can be matched, parsed, and regenerated as entirely new content that is still relevant and highly focused. You think that widgets blog is run by people? It's not. Not anymore.
#3. The Web Will Be Reviewed - More products and services are being publicly reviewed by users all over the globe. The emphasis on user-submitted reviews will become more important as marketing to individuals becomes more ubiquitous. In Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat, Globalization 2.0 is where the end user and the front provider share an intimate relationship. Thus, what the end user says about the front provider and its service or product will greatly determine how those services and products are found.
#4. Optimization For Longevity - Social networking sites like Digg and Reddit have fostered the "Get Links Quick" dream of fast and easy exposure, but they don't encourage long-term optimization. Digg traffic cascades show an extremely low hangtime for traffic spikes, and links are rarely persistent or maintained. Sites that have the most staying power are the ones who will optimize for the long-term. This means looking ahead, spotting trends and changes in the landscape before they happen, and applying that in a sustainable model.
#5. The Semantic Web - As search engines get smarter, the words you type into that search box will actually mean something. Function words will enable engines to read the incoming data in much the same way as a human does, determining not just definition and location, but context and connotation. This means your content generation will need to be even more focused and applicable for human readers--even if some of those human readers are actually human emulators! As the Google guidelines states, don't build a site for search engines, build it for people.
While all these coming changes are revolutionary in their own way, they don't change basic tenets of how the web will work. It will still thrive on and be driven by usable content and ideas. This is the web as it should be.
This is the web as it will be.
