The SEO industry was born in 2003, thanks to the advent of the Florida update. This particular update spawned the practice of acquiring links from different websites to wield a significant influence over the Google algorithm. The best practices concerning traffic from natural search have changed markedly as Google has successfully sought to close the aggressive tactical loopholes. Recently, the Penguin update has targeted ‘bad links’ and keyword-laden content on web pages.
Common misconceptions
Despite the growing awareness of natural search, it is a common misconception, even within the digital media industry, to confuse search engine optimisation (SEO) with Search Reputation Management. The former always has and always will be concerned with the simple task of search engines deciding which content to include and exclude from the search engines. For the content that gets included, the SEO has the additional task of ensuring the content remains searchable, whether it is via schema.org, integration with social media accounts, or managing the menu navigation so that the user experience is positive.
Remember that most SEOs came from an IT background where they were tasked with the challenge of increasing search traffic once the website was built. So those IT consultants that rose to the challenge of SEO naturally started getting involved in marketing duties including web copy writing, link building, Pay Per Click advertising, email campaigns, analytics, and other marketing endeavors.
The search engines have become so much smarter that the need for SEOs to get involved with content writing, whether it’s the body copy other meta descriptions and titles, has now been substantially reduced. In fact, thanks to Penguin’s targeting on over optimised content, it’s highly advisable to ban SEOs from writing content, after all their talents do not lie in writing!
Reputation
Link building, along with content strategy, has also often been confused with SEO. Whilst it is true that the PageRank algorithm is link based, link building actually falls under the realm of Search Reputation Management. When the web was more primitive, the search engines relied on links to measure site reputation as a means of assessing which information could be trusted and therefore worthy of prominent rankings in organic search.
Today, links on their own are not enough for any website to rank for competitive converting search queries. As search engines battle to discount the myriads of cheap links, webmasters became more canny by improving the content on those links, writing and rewriting lengthy articles for publishing on blog networks,sometimes aided by software. As such, Google introduced the Panda algorithm to detect and discount questionable content published on sites of questionable value.
As software becomes ever more redundant, it is the reputation of the links that matter. The reputation is determined by a number of factors including:
- whether the link content gets shared by reputable people on social media
- the number of searches for a brand name
- the sites where the links are published
Whilst SEOs will focus on driving links to your website, the Search Reputation specialist understands the power of mentions and editorial coverage. With this understanding, the specialist will create a trusted private network of sites that will not only link to your website, but also other sites featuring your brand. This in turn creates a much bigger network, hopefully one that is larger, more robust, and more reputable than the competitors, in order to take the lion’s share of traffic.
The changing ecosystem
The distinction between SEO and Search Reputation Management is important because the fields within the two disciplines are growing. SEOs now have to deal with the numerous tags for categorizing content, which evolved from HTML to Rich Snippets. As millions of internet users are using mobile devices to access content and have faster home broadband connections to handle apps and videos, SEO is fast becoming fragmented into separate specialisations including video, mobile, local, let alone the challenges of international.
To compound matters, the search engines don’t get paid for sending traffic via organic search and are therefore reducing the amount of organic search listings available to websites. Thus discouraging webmasters from actively pursuing high rankings via manipulative tactics.
The search results of tomorrow will be somewhat different from today. They could resemble an interactive infographic using a collection of images, pricing data, videos and quotes taken from different websites of the highest reputation in any body knowledge. Google calls this the “Knowledge Graph”. Whilst it might be the laughing stock of the webmaster community today, the implications of Google’s intent is serious.
Searchers may look for a product or service online, but the information borrowed from the websites will diminish the need for the searcher to click through to a website, as the information is already displayed on Google’s web page. The overall effect is less organic traffic from Google and more searches on brand names that had the sense to invest in search reputation management.
