Does Search Engine Optimization Have a Future?

In January, I wrote a post on what topics I felt would become big themes for 2007 in search engine marketing.  I still feel that all of these topics, Web Analytics, Competitive Analysis and Social Media, are all critical to our ability to our being a high value service to businesses and website owners, but I may have missed one important idea that has been building in my mind, probably since before Google's IPO.

What will search engine marketing - or specifically, search engine optimization become, and can it survive as an industry?

In recent months and in various ways, SEO experts have been debating this topic a great deal, whether or not it directly begs the question at hand.  The topic really became visible in late 2006, after Dave Pasternack's article came out questioning the value in SEO.  This conversation escalated through the forums of search discussions and was even addressed by Danny Sullivan in his rebuttal article, "Yes Virginia, SEO is Rocket Science". 

But the debate about what brings value out of SEO has been talked about in our industry before Pastnernack offered his opinion.  In early 2006, Social Patterns asked the question of why "Large SEO Firms Suck?", which emphasized Jim Boykin's thoughts on page tagging as well as Rand Fishkin's conversation with Dana Melick. Clickz contributor Shari Thurow offered a good outline for identifying a well rounded set of skill sets that distinguish qualified SEO professionals from the amateur SEO shop, including usability experience, copywriting and web development/IT expertise. That article came out in 2005, when many people were just realizing that reciprocal links weren't as valuable and maybe you should have more than just your product information on your website for content. 

Within the past couple months, SEOmoz posted a definition of the SEO expert and SEOBook challenged the notion that SEO is the only industry trying to capitalize on a customer base.  Meanwhile, SEO names such as Jim Boykin, Jeremy Shoemaker and Todd Malicoat, "Stuntdubl", have begun embracing social media because they realize that these sites drive traffic, have millions of users and offer a high potential for obtaining inbound links.   These discussions and the visibility of SEO's utilizing new opportunities online all contribute to an existing undercurrent:

What does SEO become in the near and distant future?  Can SEO survive?

Most of my in depth discussion on the topic has been around a local watering hole in Davis Square or at 8PM in the conference room at KoMarketing Associates on a Wednesday when I wanted to home by 7.  Meaning, I haven't been discussing this on a personal level with the aforementioned names above, all of which I read fairly regularly.  I was at the inaugural SEMNE meeting a couple weeks ago and listened to a great presentation by Fredrick Marckini which helped revitalize some of my own thoughts on the business of search engine optimization.

So my answers to the questions above:

• To the second question: "Yes" SEO will survive.
• To the first question (which requires the longer explanation):  SEO will become whatever strategy is required to bring people searching for your product or service, to your website, your contact form, your payment authorization page, your email inbox and your sales staff.   

Marckini stressed the notion of reaching out to vertical markets directly or indirectly related to traditional search engines, such as local search, social media sites and niche search offerings (such as news search, video etc). He suggests this because search engines like Google and Yahoo can only become incrementally better at how they rank and prioritize search results based on variables and factors related to their algorithms.  That comment precludes an assumption that eventually people will no longer use a search engine to find what they are looking for.  In fact, search engines will just become an integrated component of any mechanism/product or service that an individual uses. 

I agree with Marckini's conclusions (which echo other leaders thoughts on the industry). I believe that as long as people are searching for anything, and using Internet technology to do so, search engine optimization will be required, because businesses need to know why search technology ranks or does not rank their information ahead of the competition for whatever mechanism presents search results.  More importantly, as Google, Yahoo and other search technologies strive to integrate themselves into the everyday applications we use, SEO professionals are the ones that understand what factors make or break website visibility in search.

That means that if integrating video tutorials into YouTube brings your business quality traffic, leads, and referrals, it will transcend to how Google values your website overall.  If your images will provide you a growing appreciation from the audience in Flickr, Yahoo will take notice.  If the community at Digg, "Digg's" your articles and information, you will probably generate both traffic and inbound links, which transcend to long-term SEO success.  If your website has valuable content, a user-friendly design and experience,  engages the visitor effectively, and your business is using web analytics to identify statistics like page views, bounce rates and average length of time on site, you have a better shot at succeeding in Google's personalized search. 

Search Engine Optimization - Beyond 2007

As long as people are searching for something, using Internet technology, there will be a need to understand what the mechanisms are that prioritize search results. Search engine optimization becomes a practice of understanding where not only users, but users potentially interested in your information, will be online, what sites they visit, where their questions are being answered and what tools they are already using to find information like yours.  As technology evolves and changes, our job as SEO professionals is to identify and utilize the emerging tools and resources available that will drive traffic, visitors and improved search engine rankings to your website.  People will not stop searching, but the sources of information that influence results will.

Marketing Gone Wrong? - Bomb Scare in Boston a Result of Viral Marketing Campaign

In an interesting turn of events, two Boston-area men go to court today in connection with a bizarre publicity stunt, as reported by WBZ.  The two are allegedly responsible for placing more than three dozen illuminated electronic devices that were meant to promote a T-V cartoon, but instead sent bomb squads scrambling around the city Wednesday. The initial devices, confused to be possible explosives, caused a shut down of the Boston highway during peak morning hours, backing up traffic and commuters for hours on Wednesday, January 30th.   By afternoon, at least eight other similar suspicious packages were discovered, each triggering a security alert involving emergency crews, federal agents, bomb squads, police and the U.S. Coast Guard, as stated in the Reuters release.

Once Turner Broadcasting, realized the detrimental effects in the Boston market, they immediately notified law enforcement officials of their locations in 10 cities where it said the devices had been placed for two to three weeks: Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Ore., Austin, Texas, San Francisco and Philadelphia.  They also issued a statement, apologizing for the situation and explaining their intentions.

Read the full article from Boston.com and here is an image, courtesy of MSNBC:

What makes this even more interesting is that (as stated above) these icons have been staged for over two weeks in ten major metropolitan areas.  So either we in Boston are highly astute or everyone else better second guess there ability to observe the outside world and what's going on around them.

All jokes aside: What could Turner Broadcasting have done to make sure that something like this was prevented?   
Marketing Profs Daily Fix suggests that Boston should have known better, given the obvious nature of these devices.

My suggestion would be to put a name, a web address, a marketing slogan or something there in addition to the device - i.e. a Label.  "Aqua Teen Hunger Force", while reasonably popular, is not Coca Cola, McDonald's or "Eva Longoria", meaning the little electronic lighting figure standing there by itself in the morning darkness could be misunderstood by say, "a 50 year old father of two infants that doesn't watch Cartoon Network and is sensitive to issues of terrorism". It could be possible.

While I agree with others that to some degree, it is a laughable situation - especially in hindsight, simple labeling may have solved this issue well beforehand.

Some differing viewpoints on Boston's reaction to the viral marketing campaign:

• Guerilla Marketing Causes Boston Bomb Scare
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force viral ads cause Boston bomb scare
• Viral Marketing...not: Boston Bomb Scare

My thoughts on the value of a label
First off, a label of some sort would immediately give a clue to anyone observing the devices that it was some form of advertising gimmick.  Second, even if it did set off an alarm by some wary pedestrian - which electronic, glow-in-the-dark, circuit-like devices left unintended in public places can do - once law enforcement received word, they could easily use one of the handy tools online to search for any possible information in relation to whatever the web address, slogan or other label read. (To be fair, people were calling in on the radio waves all afternoon, trying to explain what the devices were)

What makes it difficult initially is that running a search online for "weird electronic device sitting in Sullivan Square without any identification" often yields inaccurate results, even in a trusty search engine like Google.  The label would have helped a bit.

WordPress 2.1 Released

From the WordPress Blog, the latest version of WordPress (2.1) has just been released.  Here are some of the features that I am excited about seeing in the new version:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• The new tabbed editor allowing authors to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.

Some of the features are things that I had wished were there before, and am glad to hear they will be available and look forward to working with the new software.  If anyone has any reviews or initial opinions, please comment here.  I'll also try to track reviews as they appear as well.

Firefox Takes a Social Media Advertising Strategy

Read/WriteWeb released a post on December 11th announcing the new Firefox commercials to appear in Boston and San Francisco initially.  The 4 video ads were taken from some 300 clips which were submitted to Mozilla's Firefox Flicks program and a partly sponsored by Firefox fans (sponsor names appear at the end of each commercial.  They're goal is to increase sponsorship of commercials to numbers in the thousands, with an initial investment of as little as $10.00.

What is interesting to me is how integrated social media development is becoming in mainstream media.  The news on this information and the commercials themselves have already hit YouTube and will no doubt gain more exposure over the next few days in other social media circles.

Update: I had initially found the post and thought the information was posted on January 11th, not December 11th (the correct date) - meaning I apologize ahead if the information was already distributed.

The NY Times gets Dugg into Social Media

Last week I posted on the fact that Dow Jones' MarketWatch has added "Digg It" and "Del.icio.us" link functionality to their news articles.  In a Techcrunch post this morning, the latest buzz is that mainstream news giant, the NY Times is also getting into social media integration with the availability of Digg It, Facebook and Newsvine links, as well as a "permalink" option for simply identifying the web address (no offense to the NY Times readership, but how many NY Times readers actually knew what a permalink was before this addition?) 

 

The big news here is that the NY Times has traditionally been a subscriber based news source.  While the information is really free to read anyways, the paper has gradually transitioned away from its original stance of user login for article access.  As sites like the NY Times and MarketWatch utilize social media sites like Digg and Facebook to (potentially) access larger audiences, is there awareness in appropriate ways to utilize this new type of information source online, or will it cause a dilution of quality and collaboration integrity that these sites were to be built on.

MarketWatch Adds Digg and Del.icio.us To Their News Releases

While looking at my favorite stock reports this morning in MarketWatch, I was rather stunned to see "Digg It" and "Del.icio.us" features at the top and bottom of the article. 

A quick scan on articles on the site seems to reveal that most MarketWatch content has this functionality.  While it is common to see RSS attached to most news syndication services as well as Podcast development, this is one of the first examples I've seen of social bookmarking tools being implemented as well, especially in such a large syndication service such as Dow Jones.  It also looks like MarketWatch is the first and only one of their services to incorporate this right now (possibly because services such as WSJ and Barrons are subscription based) 

Evidently, this is not new news of MarketWatch's incorporation of tagging technology, but it does demonstrate a more widespread public acceptance of these types of media channels for the distribution of information and communication.

Splogging Turns To New Methods of Spam Tactics

The "State of the Splogosphere Part IV" gives us some hope that the continued problem of spam generation of blogs may be getting solved by the big blog search engines such as Google Blog Search and Technorati.  While it is far from complete, at the least, the engineers of these search tools are recognizing the issues and addressing them as best as they can (as echoed by Matt Cutts on Saturday).

Of course, that only means that the spammers use alternative methods to driving artificial links - comment spam has taken on a whole new meaning.  Even in our blog, which received little traffic, we end up filtering out comment spam on a regular basis.  I can't imagine authoring a blog with thousands of subscribers and manually filtering out the junk they receive.  What does this mean for the future of the social network?

My opinion is that social networks need to look at better filtering technology to get rid of the junk.  WordPress TOS clearly defines their intolerance to spam on their hosted servers and it can only be a matter of time before plugins are created to filter self-hosted blogs using the open source technology as well.  But the WordPress team eliminates blogs on their network that do not conform to guidelines as well - this is not just an empty statement.  The other blog software providers should be doing the same as well as the social network providers and "enablers" such as Technorati, Digg and YouTube.  If they do not, the greater danger is that they become useless or untrustworthy.  Think about how many web directories there are on the Internet that have so little value to the user.  The same may just as likely be said about Article Directories and Press Release syndication services. 

There is a reason that Google remains at the top of search technology today - because they care about the search results that they show and continue to find ways to update their algorithm to eliminate the misuse of web technology tactics designed to "game" their results.  But more importantly, perhaps they realized the fickleness of the web user, and the fact that by not doing this, the world of Internet technology easily allows their competitor to provide a better user experience and ultimately a better website.  The same needs to happen in the environment of the social network, and probably much sooner than later.

Adding "Digg This" Links to Your Blog Posts

Have you seen "Digg This", "Digg It" and other various Digg-related hyperlinks at the bottom of blog posts recently (including this one)?  PR Squared recently had a good post answering some basic questions on the Social Media News Release (SMNR), especially when dealing with the subject of SMNR's and Technorati tagging to establish thematic relationships with your news releases. 

One portion of the post dealt specifically with adding "Digg It/Digg This" capability to the bottom or your SMNR or Blog Posts in order to allow users to easily submit your releases to the popular article community site, Digg.  This blog post provides examples of more advanced ways to enable users to automatically submit your article (with title and URL) to Digg, without manually entering in the information.  Specific Digg material on integrating Digg into your site and SMNR's can be found here.

A Couple Initial Notes on Digg

• You still need to have a registered account to submit information.
• Make sure to adhere to the Digg TOS for quality guidelines and read their FAQ ahead of time.

General Social Media News Releases
The additional code for your hyperlink to "Digg This" is very simple and requires only a slight bit of coding on the author's part.  Simply hyperlink the "Digg" text as follows using standard HTML:

• <A HREF="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=DOMAIN.COM&title=STORY TITLE">DIGG</A>
• In this case, substitute DOMAIN.COM with the web address of your SMNR and "STORY TITLE" with your specific Title.
• You can add more information to this hyperlink (such as description and topic), but I find that this can get a bit cumbersome for code purposes and offers more potential for error in coding.

Adding "Digg This" to TypePad Blogs
Because blog posts are dynamic in nature, it is slightly difficult to manually enter you code in each individual post.  Rather, your blog administrator can adjust the template of the posts to incorporate the functionality automatically. 

Instead of static parameters, TypePad users need to implement the code associated with appropriate tags in order to implement "Digg This" functionality.  That means that:

• url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>
• title=<$MTEntryTitle$>

The code that needs to be placed in the template will look like this:

• <A HREF="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<$MTEntry
  Permalink$>&title=<$MTEntryTitle$>">DIGG</A>

WordPress Functionality
Bloggers using WordPress need to follow these guidelines for proper coding:

• url=<?php the_permalink() ?>
• title=<?php the_title(); ?>

And your code for the WordPress template:

• <A HREF="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>">DIGG</A>

Using Digg with Blogger
I'm not a fan of adding a lot to Blogger in general, because if you don't save your files, then decide you want to use a new template, anything you do from a customization standpoint is lost.  That being said, here is the code for Blogger as well:

• url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>
• title=<$BlogItemTitle$>

The final product:

• <A HREF="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<$BlogItemPerm
  alinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>">DIGG</A>

The only thing left to do in any of these instances is locating the exact place where you want this link to appear.  I suggest having it at the very end of your post(s), somewhere in the footer section.  If you have any difficulty, or need assistance, feel free to comment back and I'll see if I can assist with placement and specific locations.  Enjoy!