By John N. Stewart
       
There has been a lot of focus on search engine optimization, or SEO, in the mainstream media lately.

Last week, the big news was about J.C. Penney’s recent penalties from Google over the spammy paid link tactics used to manipulate search results.

Even before JC Penney’s punishment was publicized by the New York Times, the hot SEO news concerned AOL’s purchase of The Huffington Post. Farhad Manjoo from Slate claimed that “SEO won’t work forever” and drew attention to the fact AOL purchased an overpriced asset that used obvious SEO tactics to rank for trending search terms and many variations thereof. Now there is even talk of Forbes being the next culprit to be punished publicly for tactics that sometimes are deemed commonplace within search marketing.

I frequently find the public’s lack of awareness of what goes on behind their searches funny. SEO, pay per click advertising (PPC), online reputation management (ORM), and affiliate marketing are developed, rapidly growing multi-billion dollar industries. They go seemingly unnoticed by most internet users, yet ironically have a dramatic effect on so much of their day to day life--from the products they buy to the news they read to the places they eat.

The fact that J.C. Penney, the Huffington Post, and Forbes were deliberately trying to game search engines is not newsworthy. The history of search engines could be defined by the conflict between search engines improving their ability to spot spam and marketers innovating and finding new ways to still spam search engines. Spammy or “black hat” tactics have been going out of style for years. They are about as effective now as they were a few weeks ago. The difference is that the recent wave of press about these tactics might be the catalyst needed for companies all sizes to rethink how they handle SEO and other forms of online advertising.

The acceptance of SEO as a developed marketing channel along with Google’s ability to better enforce its webmaster guidelines is already having a profound effect on the SEO industry and fundamentally altering how many organizations conduct SEO.

Here are six trends that we are already seeing but will continue to escalate:

1. SEO is far from dead and is probably more important now than ever. Despite Farhad Manjoo’s claims that “SEO won’t work forever” or Steve Rubel’s notion that Google’s instant search made “SEO irrelevant,” SEO will be important as long as people use search engines. The catch is that success will not come as easily as they did a few years ago. As the industry becomes increasingly competitive, success going forward will require far more sophistication and careful adapting to changing search engine trends.

2. Mainstream awareness of search engine penalties will increase accountability required from search marketers. Spammy “black hat” tactics have been commonplace in SEO for years. Marketers have deliberately used them because they were difficult to detect, easily scalable, and often necessary in order to compete against other offenders. Google’s improved ability to detect spam and escalated policy of penalizing offenders means different things for different types of organizations:

— Many large corporations will be more likely  develop SEO resources in-house.

— Smaller businesses (at least the smart ones) will start to avoid SEO firms that offer any form of cut-and-dry “link building” or outsource any part of the SEO process overseas.

— Many PR, advertising, and web design agencies sell SEO services to their clients. Often this work is outsourced to SEO firms that rely on commoditized off-page strategies built on layers of paid links. Some of these agencies will try to develop SEO talent in-house and the ones that don’t will need to either find more sophisticated SEO venders or increase their oversight into their SEO vendors practices. Many low cost SEO providers will be driven out of the market, and all SEO firms will have to be more accountable for their tactics.

3. Since it will be harder to generate organic search traffic, don’t be surprised by increased emphasis on tactics that maximize the value of traffic. While already important, there will be a stronger focus on web analytics to both measure results and better understand specific segments of search traffic to target. Expect to hear more buzz about conversion optimization, the process of testing variations of pages to improve outcomes, and behavioral targeting, an advertising tactic that targets visitors that have already visited specific pages of a website.

4. “Black hat” tactics like paid links and content farms will be marginalized but they’ll be back on a different scale. Many “black hat” tactics rely on developing links, usually with predetermined keywords in the hyperlink, from as many sites as possible. Since it worked and was scalable, a good portion of these links came from manufactured blogs that no one read and were interlinked with other manufactured blogs that no one read. While these practices are being marginalized quickly, get ready to see big brands and agencies jump in and replicate this strategy on a larger scale. Instead of low quality, manufactured blogs linking to other low quality blogs, we’re already seeing the emergence of companies developing highly polished microsites that are interconnected to other polished company microsites. Right now only the most adept firms are using these additional web properties to reinforce SEO and online reputation management efforts, but expect others to follow. While these tactics rely on the same principles as buying links from content farms, the legitimate communications campaigns behind them will differentiate them in the eyes of the search engines from their crude and primitive ancestors.

5. Social media is obviously a big deal in of itself, but SEO will increasingly involve integration with social media. Search engines are currently evolving beyond a link based model and are already using social elements in their ranking factors. While corporate social media spending was accelerating already, we will see more interdependence between SEO and social media efforts.

6. The spammers aren’t going to go away and will find a new ranking factor to manipulate (probably social media). Social media spamming is already rampant and this will escalate as search engines increasingly rely on social ranking factors, like personalizing search results based on content friends enjoyed. Expect social metrics like the number of followers, engagement with others, and interests of followers to impact search rankings. The recent spat over Bing copying Google’s results revealed that both search engines factor the click through rates of websites into results. Expect spammers to start using mass numbers of searches to manipulate click-through rates.

As you might gather, it’s an interesting time to be in search engine optimization. Expect SEO to continue to get more sophisticated. Companies will be dedicating more time and dollars on search.

The good news is that while these techniques will probably be more expensive than “black hat” predecessors, some companies will have plenty of paid link spending that can be re-allocated to them.

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John N. Stewart is president of Monument Optimization, a search engine marketing and online reputation management firm in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at [email protected]