ISEdb.COM

As sure as the sun shines behind the
clouds on a rainy day, a major shake-up in the search marketing
industry is coming soon. The signals are being sent and received 
through-out the various sectors of search and online marketing. Change
in any marketplace, when it does come, is often swift, brutal and
merciless. For some SEO practitioners, this one will be especially so.
While the search marketing industry has been bracing for change for at
least a year, the movement is now picking up speed and gathering
momentum. As SEOs, our working-world is going to look very different
this time next year.

The biggest change is the death of “traditional SEO”

Dead is taking it a bit far. SEO is not exactly dead. A better way to describe it would be to say it dyed.

SEO has evolved so far and so quickly in the past six months that it
as a practice is hardly recognizable from its humble roots, much like a
Neanderthal placed beside any given Homo sapien. The thread that ties
the past to the present is search. Everything still comes down to some
sort of search.  Nevertheless, the traditional view of SEO services is
over. Having languished in a virtual state of stasis for most of the
past year, the concept of traditional, SERP based SEO went to rest
sometime in the early spring.

With the introduction and rapid advancement of social networking,
the attention of the search marketing world and Internet users has
quickly spread outward, away from the common search engine results
pages. While Top10 (first page) placements are still extremely important traffic drivers,
information seekers rely on social media, RSS feed-readers, specific
vertical search tools and multimedia as frequently as they do on
traditional search engines. (That’s why the traditional search engines
are branching so far out into the social media)

This has led to a surge in the development of SEO based techniques to
work within social media environments. Clients now require social
profiles for their businesses, themselves and their key staff, along
with the proficiency of a skilled social networker to keep those
profiles popular and polite. Fortunately adaptable SEOs will find many
of these tasks fall within skill-sets that are very similar to
“traditional SEO”.

Another critical service popping up in many SEO firms is called
reputation management. With literally thousands of potential venues
open to anonymous or unmoderated postings by the public larger
companies often require professional assistance monitoring and
maintaining the numerous representations of their online reputations.
All too often though, the majority of us don’t need someone else to
make us look bad online. We’re perfectly capable of doing it ourselves.

Take a second to think about this question. How many profiles do you have available to searchers in how many different venues?

Try to consider everything from a database of church members to the
dating site one might have signed up with to the websites of local
business association. Now add MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, MyBlogLog,
and any other larger social network you or your business might have
joined. Though much of it might be restricted to members-only searches
an enormous amount of personal and business information is floating
around to be discovered, vetted, and compared with that of other
potential employees or vendors. For some, that though constitutes a
reputation management problem. Who better to find and attend to such
problems but companies that already specialize in performing searches
and creating high ranking documents?

The final nail in the coffin of traditional SEO was the introduction
of Google’s personalized results. Though personalization and
localization will be good for adaptable SEO firms, the direct interests
expressed by each unique user will increasingly determine which
documents are consistently placed in that user’s results. That means
SEOs will have to do more work on each file doing little things such as
placing calls to action leading to social or browser based bookmarking
(which requires the establishment of even more business profiles) and
building smarter link/tag networks, along with the traditional SEO
tasks covering titles, tags, text, structure and links.

Covering all those bases is not a simple task but much of the basics
remain the same. The principle application of search is used in an
increasing number of venues. While each search application differs from
venue to venue, they perform the same ultimate task. Most fall into a
limited number of types that experienced SEOs have likely dealt with
before. For instance, tagging images at Flickr or documents at Digg is
much like adding the keyword meta-tag was for Alta Vista. Similarly,
writing great personal or business profiles is much like writing a
strong description. The same principles apply from keyword to copy.

Full-scale service is going to cost a lot more for SEO firms to
provide in the near future. A worry in the business end of the SEO
industry is that tomorrow’s services (slowly being introduced today)
will cause a shake-out in the industry as less adaptable firms fall by
the wayside and smaller business clients struggle to afford an
increasingly expensive set of services. The small business situation
will cause its own short-term stirrings in the industry as the
standards of SEO services start to imitate other vertical markets.

For businesses currently relying on SEO services as a primary
traffic driver, the warnings have gone out long before this one but… 
Adapt now. Your advertising dollars are already moving away from the
mainstream media (newspaper, TV, flyers, etc…) and towards the digital
media. That trend will make digital media the number one advertising
venue by 2011 according to the influential VSS Communications Industry
Forecast, issued earlier this week.
While hardly advising immediate abandonment of the mainstream media, I
strongly advice a hard look at how next year’s marketing budget is
going to be used. You’ll likely get a lot more mileage from the viral
power of a 3-minute YouTube video than you would from a month of
localized 30-second spots. At the same time, you might want to take a
very close look at what others are saying about you or your business
online. If you find that nobody is talking about you or your business,
or that they are talking trash, you might want to do something about it.

The bottom (and hopefully last) line is simple. A new generation of
highly wired consumers is looking at monitors more than they are print
or television. The weight of their bulk is fundamentally changing how
they and other consumers use the Internet. Though it is and likely
always be about search, it’s not necessarily about search engines. Like
I said to start, a shake-up is coming in the industry and like most
shifts it is going to produce interesting results.