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Tedster started a thread at WebmasterWorld to kick off a nice and future thinking discussion around the future of SEO practices and techniques. He named the thread, next generation SEO.
He said because of all the Google updates, he and the member base at WebmasterWorld wants to "talk strategies and next generation SEO so we can battle back and fight another day."
This is how Tedster kicked it off:
(1) Focus on your visitor/customer experience
a. Understand your analytics package, make it perform to its full capacity.
b. Find the technical means to tap into browser signals for yourself.
c. Invest resources toward REPEAT visitors/customers. Offline marketers know that acquiring new business requires much more resource investment than holding on to those who have already found you.
(2) Avoid heavy handed and merely technical SEO
a. The most obvious place this applies is link building. If a type of link doesn't generate traffic (there goes analytics again) then don't go after it in any way.
b. In on-page and on-site SEO, appreciate that search engines today have many effective means to measure signals like relevance. We no longer need to "shout" at them to get our relevance messages to register.
c. Appreciate that today's algorithms are extremely complex. A simplistic "checklist" approach can create problems, or at least be a big frustration.
This is meant to be a discussion, so please do so at the forum. Yes, I love the comments here but I rather not take this conversation away from the source.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto
Comments:
Lyndon NA
10/04/2012 12:17 pm
:sigh: Hardly futuristic. Some folk have been pushing that side of things for years on end. The simple truth is that a large % of the "SEO Community" sat on their behinds using standard/established methods for "ranking", whilst utterly ignoring the rest of the picture. Only now - as G have gone to town and kicked in the wheels of their link-schemes, repeat/similar content and stuffing practices are they pulling their heads out and looking around. The "future" they talked about has been sat around them for at least 3 years now. Infact, some of that is actually "the past".
Rounin Media
10/04/2012 02:44 pm
I am optimistic that with the tools it now has at its disposal Google is in a far stronger position than ever before to computationally assess and rank websites in a manner similar to how a human reviewer might rank them. A lot of the squealing appears to be coming from algo-gamers who are indignant that Google has finally turned a water cannon on their merry carnival.
Adam Collings
10/04/2012 03:43 pm
I think it's important to remember that Google has share holders, share holders want more money. So start by diversifying what you are good at professionally and realize that eventually there will be no more organic results. Have a career plan in place to address that concern once it comes up.
The SEO Life
10/04/2012 10:40 pm
I agree. I wouldn't necessarily call any of this new. Maybe just good sense.
John Brown
10/05/2012 03:08 am
so, go somewhere - i don't know where, bring me something - i don't know what. yes, it exactly how search engines working at this days.
John Brown
10/05/2012 03:10 am
really only one way exist, need to find way to survive online without google. Google is not trustworthy anymore, later matt cutts tell you additional billion of reasons why our sites cannot rank in google anymore.
John Brown
10/05/2012 03:11 am
you are joking??? or trolling?
John Brown
10/05/2012 03:14 am
google created that game and now changing it, but at the expense of their search quality. Most of queries return or lot of youtube, or wikipedia or just vanilla results (which often completely useless)
Neha
10/05/2012 05:57 am
Now days I found much less relevancy as compared to 1-2 year back on Google. Fighting with Spam doesn't mean that all small website which are working on SEO may Sweap away by Google. Small website does have much more relevancy than large websites and portals. Google is nurturing money from Ads Because website owners now think that because of SEO their website may get affected for ranking. Google has positioned Fear in the mind of website owners, SEO and Webmasters. But We know that truth is --- Good Website is Key of Success and you all know what I meant with good website. If you make happy your visitors they will surely be your regular visitors. As I am fond of seroundtable I love its information and content.
Richa
10/05/2012 07:46 am
I agree with Rounin... Google has established itself as the biggest player of the game. It is not only necessity but the responsibility of the Google to tighten the online marketing whether it is organic search or paid. Google could not afford a loss of its users... In dynamic online search and marketing industry it is must for him to deliver the best results to claim his position. Neither people would leave using Google nor advertisers would leave any channel to reach their customers.......
Robert Benwell
11/25/2012 09:14 pm
Good thing that they implement new thing that could make SEO looks better. Many SEOrs will surely like this. Thanks for sharing this one.
Rounin Media
11/26/2012 03:06 pm
I'm neither joking, nor trolling. After a decade and a half of watching algo-gamers crow about their latest tricks & algorithm deceptions I would be more than happy to see time called on the whole, ridiculous highly-gamed search landscape, which has been of limited help to very few. For me, SEO has always meant assisting algorithms to correctly determine what a given website is about, not what it isn't about. The term was "SEO" smudged and blackened many years ago by shifty, partisan little people who cared more about traffic volume than about accurate site categorisation. That's a shame, but maybe the tide is finally turning. And, to my mind, that would be a very good thing. Time for websites to be judged for what they are, not for what they pretend to be.
Amir
02/13/2013 05:42 pm
Well you really ask a good thing, SEO goes more difficult in future. seocel.blogspot.com