I read a very interesting blog this morning about the next steps in Search and where it’s going in the next couple of years? Furthermore, what do marketers, especially those in SEO have to take in to account when planning for the future of search marketing campaigns? The blog by Rebecca Lieb from ClickZ goes on to list some of the predictions regarding the future of search, both in the short and long-term. And here it is:

More Universal

ComScore research shows that universal (or blended) search results are increasingly dominating SERPs. In early 2008, 17 percent of searches returned some type of blended result. By the end of last year, that figure had climbed to 31 percent of all search results, and it continues to rise. This is true across all the engines, and Microsoft’s launch of Bing confirms there’s no end in sight.

More blended results — the appearance on the page of video, book, news, local, and you-name-it results — means stiffer competition for valuable SERP real estate. All those headers, thumbnails, and images take up space on the page, allowing for fewer results to appear in the top results returned by the engines.

SEO Gets More Complicated

You’ll have to optimize pretty much everything: video, images, books, news, and more. Carefully selected keywords in Web page copy just won’t cut it as an SEO strategy for long. Metadata around images, audio and video transcripts, and carefully crafted headlines in news releases and stories are already important but will soon become vital tools in the SEO arsenal. San Diego search marketing professionals preach that SEO is getting more complicated by the day. You’ll be competing not only for that valuable real estate but also for the right users. As search algorithms become more sophisticated, blended results will take the searcher into account. They’ll be based, at least in part, by geolocation, time of day, search history, and social affinities. It won’t be just about appearing in search results but also about appearing to the right searcher, at the right place, at the right time, and with the right media.

Search Will Go Social

Increasingly, it will become harder to optimize based on keywords alone. Context and searcher intent will shape the results individual searchers are returned on their queries.

Search engines already take behavioral data and individual search history into account when returning results. Watch for them to rely on social and network affinities as well. The groups, tribes, and organizations individuals gravitate to speak volumes about the direction of their intentions.

While introducing social elements into search adds another not-to-be-sneezed-at layer of complexity on things, it will also make search even more valuable as a feedback mechanism than it already is. Reputation management and listening will become inextricably linked to search, as consumers grow their online networks and publicly share their affinities; predilections; and brand-, product-, and service-related stories. (For a deeper dive on this issue, take a look at some recent columns by Mike Grehan.)

Platform = Intent

Searchers aren’t just searching on the Big Three search engines. YouTube is now the second-largest search engine in the world, query-wise, following only Google. MySpace gets more queries than AOL or Ask.com, while eBay, craigslist, and Amazon combined (980 million) approach MSN.com (1.04 billion) in search queries, according to comScore.

Web site visitors are more sophisticated. They’re adapting their search behavior to the appropriate search platforms. It’s a development that may make SEO a little bit less complicated, assuming marketers develop the right mindset. It’s time to start thinking about all types of sites as search engines, not just as video sites or classifieds or shopping sites. If you can search it, you can optimize it. In fact, Rank-Mobile’s Cindy Krum is all about optimizing apps for sale on the iPhone app store. Heck, that’s a search engine too, if you think about it. And if you don’t think about it that way, you should start.

Smart Phones = Smarter Searching

Mobile will help blow out the search space. Google’s Sergey Brin recently noted that one third of Google queries coming from Japan are made on mobile devices. While mobile phone sales are flat, smartphone sales are through the roof these days, contributing to the trend in this part of the world. Think geolocation and apps as the drivers in mobile search, particularly service-based apps such as restaurant finders and highly specialized apps, such as MizPee (clean bathrooms), TapIt (free local water bottle refills), and the AAA discount app for members of the auto club. These are ad free but not sponsor free and have the potential to drive plenty of local, walk-in business.

The Long Term

What’s waiting on the search horizon? Educated guesses will have to take the place of crystal balls. Here are some prognostications:

* Real-time results. What about something that happened 10 minutes ago? With the possible exception of Twitter, immediate events aren’t searchable or readily crawlable. They will be. Google has as much as admitted it’s on the case.

* Multimedia as searchable and optimizable. Who’s this a picture of? What song is this clip from? A few highly technical and specialized search engines are tackling these issues now, but eventually such queries will become much easier to search for, as well as become integrated into “old-fashioned” search engines.

* Location, location, location. Geotargeted results will grow in importance, particularly with the rise of smartphones. Expect hyper-local geotargeting in the future, not dissimilar to the direction such companies as NearbyNow are going in. Imagine walking into a mall or supermarket and using your phone to find the right jeans at the lowest price or instantly learning what brand of corn flakes is on special and where they are in the store.

* All search, all the time. Finally, search will be an always-on utility, integrated into the devices you routinely use to perform everyday tasks. When you think about it, your TV or DVR program guides are search. So is your car’s GPS system and your iPod’s playlist menu. Searchability, and attendant marketing possibilities, will show up in in-store kiosks, perhaps even on your refrigerator. Even more than now, search will become the de facto way we navigate our lives.

In my opinion, the always-on utility for search will be the most quickly-adopted advancement among consumers. It will eliminate the need for things like phonebooks, TV guides (do those even exist anymore?) and even mapquest will have to evolve to adapt to the changing environment. The implications for this advanced form of SEO are exciting, and San Diego search marketing consultants can help you figure out how to tap this great resource. People are still getting used to the idea of real-time results through Twitter, when some major event occurs, we will have instant access to information about that event. Things will be so much easier to research, we will retrieve information faster, easier and more efficiently in this type of environment.

We wanted to share with you a little more about our general and specific processes regarding search engine optimization, particularly because Google says to never trust a search engine optimizer who won’t explain their methods.  (Not that we don’t have a few trade secrets!)

Stage one analysis includes (but isn’t limited to):

Meta Data

• Picking the right keywords for every page, doing a deep dive statistical analysis on search volume, competition, and relevance of a word to your page.
• The same for your pages title, and the uniqueness, within a site, of the title.
• Usage of “alt” tags for all images and “title” tags for anchors
• The length of your meta description, it’s appearance on the search engines, phrasing, and inclusion of keywords and words listed on the same page.

Content Analysis – Some of this does appear during the design phase if you have Jacob Tyler create your site.

• Internal Linking Structure
• Where are links on a page?
• What are they linking to?
• Other pages on your site
• External linking for helpful sites or authority sources
• What is the link text?
• Spelling
• Grammar
• Four clicks or less to get to anything on the site
• Call to action
• Presentation and layout
• Use of heading text, structure, and page placement
• Use of bold, underlined, and italicized text and their placement on a page

Our in depth Search Engine Optimization service is primarily concerned with many other things including (but not exclusively) the following:

Standards:

• Page Doctype specification
• W3C Standards Compliance to newest technologies available
• Error free JavaScript
• Error free CSS
• Error free XHTML

Domain Setup

• URL structure
• Is your URL even right for you?
• Should you use a personalized nameserver

Architecture & Server Setup

• Where JavaScript and CSS files are included in a page
• Various kinds of page and file compression methods
• Apache Configuration
• Use of 404 error pages
• Internal redirection
• Server requests and lookups
• Number of documents on a site
• Number of files on a page
• Page load times
• Use of a Content Delivery Network service to reduce network hops
• A few other tricks up our sleeve…

Machine Informative

• Usage of robots.txt for search engines, dynamic where applicable
• Dynamic (where applicable) XML Sitemaps

Security – Because we’re digging into the nitty gritty anyway…

• Hiding the site’s underlying technology – techniques such as removing the “.html” or the “.php” from the user agent
• Hiding the CMS platform (when one is used) from the user agent

Better SEO Article 3 of 3

-jb

There are many benefits of using CSS. One of the major benefits of using CSS is the easy maintenance of the website. Maintenance of a website made with CSS is much easier compared to the ones which are table based. CSS splits the presentation style of documents from the content of documents and makes the maintenance of the site easier. Aside from being able to make site extensive changes with no trouble through one CSS file, the clean code it generates makes it easier to update. Webmasters can characterize the appearance of a site in one place, and change the whole site by changing just one file. With CSS, when you decide to craft a change, you simply alter the style, and that element is updated automatically anywhere it appears in the site. So, if you have to alter the color of all pages in your site, you only have to edit one style sheet. This saves you enormous amount of time, particularly if you have to edit each page independently. CSS generally requires less code compared to table based. This makes your code lighter and cleaner. Clean code makes a huge difference in maintaining your site.

Cascading Style Sheets Benefits and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another major benefit of CSS is that it makes your website SEO friendly. The reason behind this is simple. The search engines spiders are actually very lethargic. They do not go through the bundles of HTML codes to get to the indexed codes. Font tags and tables make the HTML code very cumbersome; thus, reduce the accuracy of the results. If you use external CSS files to design and determine the design attributes; the HTML code will be clean and it will result to better search engine rankings. With some knowledge of CSS you will be able to change the code layout without destroying the actual visual layout. For instance, you could easily make the main content of your site to show up above the header or navigation menu in the code of your website; thus will help to show search engine crawlers the importance of your content. I personally saw a huge boost in rankings in fully CSS web sites. When I look at someone’s website that was built using old school HTML code with tags such as: TABLES, TD, TR, FONT and so on, I feel awkward and immediately convert that site to a fully table-less CSS layout. There are many tools on the Internet that shows the actual code over text ratio weight of your site. Do you know why? Because modern search engines such as: Google, Yahoo and MSN love light-weighted websites. They want to see your content; the text, not the code. With CSS everything is possible. You practically externalize excessive code into external file, thus leaving the actual page clean and simple.

Website Accessibility

CSS makes your website more accessible. The number of users browsing the web through hand held devices are continuously growing tremendously. It is estimated that by 2008, one third of the world’s population will be using hand held devices for accessing Internet. It is always important that your site is accessible to them also. You can make an additional CSS document particularly for handheld devices like cell phones, which will be called up in place of the regular CSS document; which is not achievable with a tabular layout. CSS benefits accessibility chiefly by separating document structure from presentation. By separating style from markup, webmasters can simplify and clean up the HTML in their documents, making the documents more accessible.

Increases Download Speed of Your Website

CSS code downloads faster than tables. Browsers read through tables twice previous to exhibiting their contents; first to work out their structure and then to determine their content. Moreover, tables are shown on the screen as a whole, no part of the table will be displayed until the entire table is downloaded and rendered. Tables support the use of spaced images to assist with positioning. CSS generally requires less code than cumbersome tables. All code to do with the layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then stored on the user’s computer; while the table layout stored in each HTML document, must be loaded up each time a new page downloads. Also with CSS, you can manage the order of the items downloaded into the screen. You have the control to make the content appear previous to the slow loading images, which is liked by most of the web users.

Cross Browser Compatibility

For all webmasters out there! CSS makes your website more professional. Taking the benefits of CSS like making your websites load faster and easy to maintain, you save a lot of time and labor. This in turn makes you lots of money. CSS makes links of the website look more attractive and dynamic. Using CSS, you can slot in rollovers easily and effectively, without having to use a single character of JavaScript. Thus, CSS gives your websites a professional look. It is wise to use CSS to jive with the current trends of the industry. All major browsers like Firefox, Explorer, and Netscape presently recognize CSS and it is definitely safe for web designers to use CSS now.