Search engine optimisation is becoming more and more like internet marketing over time. Where once the balance between science and art in SEO leaned heavily towards the science component, now search engine optimisation takes a big whack of creativity to succeed. This is a trend that will only increase in the future, and it’s because of the increased sensitivity of the search engines to internet user behaviour.
Behavioural studies and psychology might be technically in the science department, but there is a certain amount of intuition involved when you want to react to the needs of the average Joe. People, when you get down to it, are human. They don’t react well to standard formulas. This is why the search engines have been working over time to more human elements into their algorithms. The consequence has been smaller divisions between user groups. This has resulted in a need for more fine-tuning of SEO and internet marketing to respond to those groups.
The trend toward long-tail keywords has been one of the main indicators of this change. Once upon a time, focussing on keywords that were just one or two words long would have been an excellent plan for SEO. Things have changed. Now, if really you want to secure your target markets, you’ll work one or two long-tail keywords into your plan. You can discuss this with us at SEO Consult Australia. In the very near future, having one-word keywords won’t get you very far at all.
Other things will change, too. Your social interactivity, for example, is likely to become a stronger asset. As internet users spend more social time on the net, having a social side to your site is like a stand-in for a smile at your counter, a little touch that will keep users coming back. Most importantly, the way the search engines will rank your site will change. Already, the value of experience you provide to your site’s users has become a more important factor than some of the traditional areas of SEO.
Why the change? Well, the change is really coming from internet users, who are the strongest factor in the evolution of the internet. If internet users don’t pick up on a new technology, it might as well not exist. If they do, it’s internet gold. Facebook has learned this lesson with Twitter, whose platform is essentially the Facebook status update function running solo. Smart businesses pay attention to what internet users want, and Google has always been a very smart business.
The good news is that this trend toward a human approach means less for the future of SEO than it does for internet marketing. The internet marketing plan in the future is going to have to include SEO as a matter of course, as the organic traffic to a site will be forming a bigger chunk of overall traffic. Internet marketing and SEO already support each other, but in the near future traditional marketing forms will have to take more of a back seat.
