Search Engine Optimization is dead. Search engine rankings no longer matter. I see a lot of link bait to that effect floating around these days. So what’s the deal? Is SEO still relevant in 2009?
Yes. More than ever.
If interest in a subject is an indicator of relevance, then SEO is clearly still alive and kicking. This graph, taken from Google Insights for Search, shows searches for “seo” at an all-time high.
The thing is though, SEO is changing…a lot. It’s not about keywords in meta tags and PageRank anymore. There are some big changes on the horizon for SEO professionals, and even though we’ve been seeing some of them for quite a while, 2009 might end up being the year we see the dials get cranked up significantly on the newer factors.
Incidentally, this article focuses primarily on Google since a) Google generates the lion’s share of organic search traffic, b) Yahoo! isn’t exactly leading the way in search these days, and c) Microsoft can’t even pay people to use their search engine. However, it stands to reason that any of the trends below that prove successful will be duplicated by other search engines.
So what does an SEO pro need to know? Here’s my list…
Emerging Factors in SEO for 2009
Search Engine Circumvention
The extensive use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can, to some extent, take the place of search engines in the sense that people are using them to find information. On Twitter, for example, you’ll find many direct requests for recommendations on various products, services, and information. In this example, search engines are circumvented altogether in favor of information exchanges within trusted social groups. I see this as a growing trend.
Social actions
Circumvention aside, social networks can help SEO quite a bit too. All those Diggs, Stumbles, Tweets, and Delicious bookmarks that come about as a result of publishing your outstanding content can generate significant direct traffic and drastically improve your site’s backlink profile, thereby improving organic rankings. Algorithmically speaking, it’s both conceivable and likely that the number of social actions corresponding to a particular URL will have direct affect on the search engine ranking for that URL.
Google SearchWiki
Google’s SearchWiki feature could dramatically affect search engine rankings if it achieves critical mass. I’m not referring to the literal change in rankings that takes place when a user selects a site to rank higher, but rather the Digg-like mechanism that’s created by many of these actions being recorded and subsequently introduced into Google’s ranking algorithm.
Semantic Search, Behavior-based Search, & Intent-based Search
I group these together because they are all equally fuzzy and debatable from my perspective, and each is intrinsically linked to the other. Semantic search attempts to understand a word or phrase’s meaning through disambiguation. For example, is a search for “the cure” in reference to the band or the book? Next, you have to understand semantics in order to present search results that contain related subject matter, which is of course the goal of behavior-based search. And finally, if you’ve compiled lots of data about the meaning and relationships of people’s searches, you can begin to anticipate and introduce new, eerily fascinating content to the unsuspecting user. Don’t be evil, huh? We’ll see.
Organic Click-through Rate
Click-through rate (CTR) has long been an important factor in determining your Quality Score for Google Adwords SEM campaigns, which determines what you’ll have to pay for each click on a given key phrase. It only makes sense that Google would apply CTR data to its algorithm for organic search results. If ten people search for “blue widgets” and four of them click on your link, you’ve got a 40% CTR. Whether or not that’s good depends on your position in the SERPs. If you’re in the #1 spot, a 40% CTR sucks and your rankings will drop. If you’re in the #7 spot, a 40% CTR is awesome and this will be reflected iteratively as the rankings shuffle.
Time on Site & Bounce Rates
This has likely been a ranking factor for some time, but as the analytical capabilities of the major search engines evolve, so too will their ability to measure and quantify user engagement as a means of determining search engine rankings. If you’re lucky enough to have a site that has good organic search rankings, yet struggles with a high bounce rate and low time on site, you should consider your days of high rankings numbered unless you can create more site stickiness. This will almost certainly become more important as a ranking factor considering the ease with which it can be measured today.
Universal Search
We’ve seen multimedia search results intermingled within the search engine results pages (SERPs) since around mid-2007, but we’re seeing them more and more. SEO folks need to be thinking about optimizing not only web pages, but every type of indexable media you see displayed in those universal search results.
Location-Based Search Results
Differences in the SERPs viewed from different geographical locations has been clearly evident for quite a while. I made the mistake once of bragging about a #1 result for a competitive phrase during a phone conversation with my boss from within the same building. Turned out his connection was routed through one of our corporate data centers in another state, and mine was going through a local Wi-Fi connection in our local office in Maryland. I tried to explain the location-based search thing, but he wasn’t impressed.
Conclusion
SEO has become a multi-disciplinary profession. A serious SEO professional has to understand marketing, audience development, statistical analysis, web development, social trends, linguistics, and more. This makes SEO more relevant than ever – SEO 2.0, if you will.
So…what factors do you think will influence organic rankings the most in 2009?
Related Articles
This article was inspired by and expands upon several ideas presented in these two excellent articles:
