In case you didn’t get the flurry of tweets on my account this week, you wouldn’t know I have been at SMX Sydney 2009. SMX stands for Search Marketing Expo. This pretty much sums up the conference.
I have been working in the web for a rather long time now, and pretty much from the beginning, there has been a need to find relevant content. It is a constant that hasn’t changed; just the ways we get to it has changed.
Before there was Google there were other engines, and since then optimising content has been necessary to get your content found. Note I say content not sites.
One of the important elements from SMX this year is the prevalence of the new windows to content that exist, and that change is always occurring.
Does it mean traditional Search practices are dying? Definitely not. In fact, with all the Social Media hype about at present, one could not be blamed for thinking Search had dropped of the relevance radar.
It hasn’t.
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Don’t get me wrong - like everyone who has been around the web for a long (read:maybe too long) time, Google has been an important part of opening the interweb up to the masses and making many web based things easy.
But…
As a closet data miner, and Information Analyser, I often wonder about when the popular masses will get as paranoid about their data collection services as they were here in Australia over the Australia Card debate, in the 1980s.
I was reading this morning a couple of interesting posts, 1 of which I tend to agree with, although I can see the value in both messages.
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We regularly get asked for some magic bullet or quick fix to get to the top of Search Engine results.
For many sites we see there is a bit of a quick fix, just getting the basics done right, or near right (if you want to stay away from the engines radar for being too perfect), but most of the site owners wanting the magic bullet are in tough categories.
I have been involved with SEO since before Google dropped on our radars, and for the large part now the basics are the areas that generate the best results. And no I am not suggesting that doing the basics will get a result for every site in every category, however in the long run (which most businesses are in for) the fundamentals matter.
Think of it a bit like a football team / game of football (ok lets use Rugby Union as our football analogy for now). This year in the Super 14 we are seeing a lot of new experimental laws.(hmm this sounds a little like some of the latest google changes).
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OK so doing SEO won’t lose you any pounds but I really like this article and the association between maintaining your health and fitness and maintaining your SEO rankings.
This issue comes up for us a lot when we explain why we provide ranking and update services as a monthly service.
As those of us who might have gone to the trouble to lose weight and get fit realise you cannot rest on your laurels and as soon as you get slack with it the sloppy bits return.
Have a read there is a lot of wisdom in these words, in relation to making sure you keep your eye on the ball and don’t just try 1 hit goes at SEO.
Maintaining your Rankings
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Further to my introduction I had a great time in Chicago at the Search Engine Strategies conference.
Conference attendees included companies like ours from around North America as well as a large number of Site owners and / or managers for medium to large US corporations who were looking to improve their understanding of how to optimise their sites for profit.
Not every site being optimised has something to sell directly but everyone should have a measure of what profit means for their site.
How do you optimise for profit?
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