Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:13:31 by Kerry Dye
As an SEO company, Vertical Leap spends a lot of its time explaining the processes we use and monitoring the effects that our efforts have on the traffic and rankings for our websites.
We also monitor the blogs and websites for information of interest to us. We read a lot of information on a daily basis, some of which we agree with and some of which we don’t. We filter the information in the blogosphere past our own experiences and evaluate it. With a hundred or so clients we have a lot of data to check other people’s hunches about the way that search results are changing.
So it was with great interest that yesterday, I read two items of interest. One was a summary of Bruce Clay’s PubCon presentation, and the other was Google’s Release of their SEO Starter Guide.
The focus of Bruce Clay’s presentation was the evolution of SEO in 2009 (including forecasting the death of rankings again). Predicting the future is always difficult and he’s made a reasonable extrapolation of what could happen.
Google’s foray into the future of SEO is interesting too. Whilst there has always been a tacit acknowledgement of SEO, their published information was a little thin on the ground e.g. this page which mainly seems to warn people against SEO companies :-) I’m not counting Matt Cutt’s blog here, because it is technically independent.
What this meant was that people were aware of search engine optimisation, but then turned to other sources to get the ‘how to’ information. This has caused a few problems along the way because of the fluid nature of the internet – what worked for SEO in 2003 might not be appropriate (even dangerous) today.
So it was with great interest that I read through the document that Google has provided. From a SEO professional’s point of view, it may be a little superficial in places (yes, we all know that title tags are important, but the order of words matters too), but for many webmasters even this level of information could be a revelation.
So we have two very contrasting views on SEO – one is the high level professional view all about the changing landscape and how we will all be changing the way we work in the future. The other is Google’s back to basics viewpoint which I think illustrates that they still think that the majority of sites have a long way to go to be truly “search engine friendly”.
Dealing with lots of sites on a daily basis, when reading these I can appreciate both are valid interpretations of what SEO is, but the underlying message of the two is quite different. This demonstrates that SEO doesn’t quite mean the same thing to everyone.
Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
