Traditional SEO (search engine optimization) campaigns have focused on building links. However, the ways in which businesses will need to execute link strategies are evolving daily due to social media, blogs, and even search engine algorithm changes. Links to your site, known as backlinks, help build your page rank and are essentially individual votes in an ongoing poll to determine your positioning in the results for searches of various keywords. Many marketers attempt to build links that help your site beat the competition in the keywords deemed important to your marketing strategy and your business’s goals (see earlier Keywords blog post).
The most common strategy, and the one that many marketing firms offer under the term SEO, attempts to manually spam blogs and forums with links to your site. Evidence suggests, however, that this type of SEO delivers less results than it used to—and may be a waste of money. To combat link spamming, Google developed “nofollow”, a URL component that prevents a link from passing “link juice” with the link. In other words, if a link is tagged as a “nofollow” then search engine spiders skip right over it as they catalogue and value backlinks. The widespread adoption of this tag has significantly reduced the ROI of link spamming campaigns. Only 1 in 100 links that a marketer creates will be followed and pass the “link juice.” Aside from unethical and illegal use of posting bots such as XRumer, in today’s environment it is very cost ineffective to hire an SEO firm to create backlinks for you in this fashion.
Aside from nofollow links, another specter looms on the horizon that will help shape the future of SEO strategy. Google recently announced their new SearchWiki program which will allow human correction and guidance in the selection and ordering of search results. If you are signed in to a Google account when searching, you have seen the “Up” and “X” boxes in your search results. These allow users like you to vote up and vote down content for searches. The immediate effect is that a down-vote will send your site to the bottom of the results for that user, and an up-vote will bring you to the top. In the future, these votes will likely affect overall Google rankings, but even now it should affect marketers’ SEO strategy and fundamental web strategy. Every website bounce is a potential down-vote for your site to the bottom of that user’s searches. Every up-vote is an opportunity to further engage a particular consumer in future searches. It will become necessary to be very relevant to the user and to identify and control bounce rates.
We believe that this sort of human optimization will be the next evolution in SEO. Page optimization of content for search engine robots (meta-tags, keyword density, and positioning) will be just the start of an SEO strategy going forward. To continue to hold a search engine position, a traditional backlink strategy will not be enough. It will be necessary to engage the social media sphere on the web and attempt to get relevant users that will provide links to your content and build attention to your website on Google, or other user voting platforms such as Digg. Perhaps this isn’t a bad thing – the sites with the most truly relevant content will ultimately rise to the top of the heap.