SEO: Past, Present & Future

Copyright. All Rights Reserved Pierce Communications. 2012

SEO: Past, Present & Future Barry Adams Pierce Communications



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


SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

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


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


Google vs SEO


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.


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.


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


And of course we’re losing data…

Keyword: (not provided)

Unless you pay for it – i.e. AdWords.


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.


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


The future of SEO


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.


The semantic web = context

• Who

• What

• Where

• When

• Why

• How


How does Google understand…

…Who?

Google+ profiles

Google+ pages

Rel=author



…What?

Products

Reviews

Recipes

Events

etc…..

SCHEMA.ORG



…Where & when?

Android

Schema.org Events markup



…Why & how?

It doesn’t… yet.


Tapping in to the semantic web


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


How do you benefit?

• Local Business:


How do you benefit:

• Events:

• Reviews:

• Authorship:


Facebook Graph Search


Socially-rich search results


Potentially embarrassing…


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.


What else is coming?

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

Questions? [email protected] http://twitter.com/badams http://www.piercecommunications.co.uk

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SEO: Past, Present & Future