The internet continues to grow on a daily basis at a relentless pace and it’s fare to say this is because of and impacting on search marketing as a marketing channel.
In many ways this growth in the internet has made search marketing a more professional business, in some ways it has made it a much more difficult art to practice.
The interesting thing about search marketing is the degree with which it changes, things that work one day don’t work the next and it’s important to keep on top of the latest developments.
Search marketers themselves contribute towards this as the search engines continue to close off the holes that search marketers expose.
What is Content Milling?
The content mill is the churn of information that’s being produced for websites that for all intents and purposes is designed to try and affect the search engines.
This is content that’s relevant to the theme of the site and the surrounding neighbourhood, but generally doesn’t add anything to the cultural sphere, this content is content for the sake of content, content to produce more noise, what I tend to call information spam, and believe me – I’ll do it as well if it will drive qualified visitors to a website I’m working on!
What’s the future of Information Spam?
Google is moving towards more personalised results, so I’d guess that information spam will start to have less effect in the search engines, I reckon this may take a year or two before Google get to grips with it properly, once they do there will invariably be a readjustment in the rankings and the way that we as search marketers do things will once again change – constantly the push will be moving us towards writing great content that’s focused on SEO only because it’s great content that adds something worthwhile to the cultural sphere.
What’s happening in SEO now?
At the moment there seems to be a return to the creation of additional content to try and soak up as much of the long tail traffic out there, as well as creating good link bait articles which will draw in organic links to the sites.
Although people are still selling links, all the major players have been banned from Google’s index, whilst Google keeps saying that 2010 will see the end of the paid link as a form or SEO.
Can Google stop paid link advertising?
It will in some form or another, Google has already become very efficient and working out how important a link is on page due to it’s position in context to the rest of the page, giving more weight to the links that appear in the body text and less to the links that appear to be navigational. This would probably mean they are giving less weight to paid links which more often than not look like paid links.
If websites that publish paid links want to say in business they’ll need to make sure their links look more and more natural and in context.
We have to think that in 2009 Google put to pay No Follow links as a form of PageRank sculpting and at the moment no one has stuck their head above the parapet and come up with an equally efficient method of getting the search engine to do what we want it to.
Does search marketing have a future?
Yes, definitely. As long as people use search engines to find the information they are looking for there will always be a call for a search marketer, I think search marketing will be notably different, it will be moving towards it’s most perfect form which is usability and good content.
A search marketer will be the flip side to the usability coin, one being web design and the other being web content.
As always with search marketing the KPIs you need to be focusing on are the bottom line, forget rankings, they died a long time ago when people stopped putting in two word phrases as the norm, forget number of hits – that’s such an old metric now, forget time of page, so what, what’s that telling you? Forget number of page views.
At 2am we focus on the bottom line, and the bottom line is this: is your SEO paying for itself?