SEO: Past, Present & Future

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SEO: Past, Present & Future Barry Adams Pierce Communications

Copyright. All Rights Reserved Pierce Communications. 2012

Copyright. All Rights Reserved Pierce Communications. 2012

Barry Adams

• Digital Services Director at Pierce Communications

• Built my first website in 1995, started my career in all things online in 1997

• Specialisation in SEO

• Dutch (yes, really)

• Previous employers include;

Philips Electronics

Honeywell

Quotezone

Independent News & Media (Belfast Telegraph)

• Editor for StateofSearch.com

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SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

“Driving relevant traffic to websites via organic search results.”

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A brief history of SEO

• 1994 – 1998: the golden years;

Yahoo directory

Altavista / Hotbot / Ask Jeeves

• 1998 – 2004: Google ascending;

Links, links, links

• 2005 – 2010: Incremental search intelligence;

Blogs as link sources

Universal search

• 2010 – now: Conflict;

Google declares war on SEO

Search for the holy grail: Semantic Search

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Google vs SEO

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First there was the ‘May-Day’ update

• Positioned as an update against ‘cookie-cutter’ websites, the May-Day update was the first big step in Google’s move to favour big brands over small websites.

• It downgraded the visibility of small (non-brand) websites on Long Tail keywords.

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Then there was the ‘Panda’ update

• Aimed to penalise what Google perceived as ‘low quality content’.

• Further strengthened the position of big brands, devalues affiliate sites and resellers.

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And then came the ‘Penguin’ update

• The ‘over-optimisation’ update, targeting;

Link schemes

Unnatural link profiles

Keyword stuffing

• Forces every website that wants to rank in Google to invest in building a strong online brand

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And of course we’re losing data…

Keyword: (not provided)

Unless you pay for it – i.e. AdWords.

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So, right now, what makes for good SEO?

• Build an online brand;

• Publish great content that people want to share & link to;

• Earned links;

Blogger outreach

Genuine newsworthy PR

• Focus on social signals;

Twitter / Facebook / Pinterest / Google+ / etc…

• Implement Google+ optimisation;

Authorship markup

Google Places -> Google+

• Tick all the technical on-site optimisation boxes.

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SEO is not its own separate silo any more

SEO overlaps with:

• Social Media;

Social signals feed in to organic search

• Web Development;

Technical on-site SEO is increasingly important

• Web Design;

User engagement helps SEO

Calls-to-action & social sharing

• Google AdWords;

Keyword research

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The future of SEO

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Trends in search

For the past 15 years search engines have evolved from information retrieval to the semantic web.

Information retrieval: User types in a query, the system retrieves and displays the most relevant results.

Semantic web: User types in a query, the system attempts to understand the context of the search and the user and show the most contextually relevant results.

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The semantic web = context

• Who

• What

• Where

• When

• Why

• How

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How does Google understand…

…Who?

Google+ profiles

Google+ pages

Rel=author

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How does Google understand…

…What?

Products

Reviews

Recipes

Events

etc…..

SCHEMA.ORG

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How does Google understand…

…Where & when?

Android

Schema.org Events markup

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How does Google understand…

…Why & how?

It doesn’t… yet.

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Tapping in to the semantic web

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What does Google support?

Google supports rich snippets for the following types of structured data:

Reviews

People

Products

Businesses and organisations

Recipes

Events

Music

Videos

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How do you benefit?

• Local Business:

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How do you benefit:

• Events:

• Reviews:

• Authorship:

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Facebook Graph Search

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Socially-rich search results

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Potentially embarrassing…

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How to tap in to Graph Search?

• Facebook Likes;

Diverse Like demographic

• Facebook Check-ins;

Encourage check-ins with offers

• More to come as Graph Search rolls out and SEOs will find ways to exploit optimise for it.

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What else is coming?

Copyright. All Rights Reserved Pierce Communications. 2012 Copyright. All Rights Reserved Pierce Communications. 2012

Questions? badams@piercecommunications.co.uk http://twitter.com/badams http://www.piercecommunications.co.uk