The Changing Face of Search Engine Optimization

With the ever evolving internet market for just about anything you can imagine and
Google’s index growing to almost 9 billion pages, and counting, there is little
dispute amongst search engine optimizers that our job is getting much harder.
From linking to articles, and density to ontology, our industry changes as fast as
any other. The search engines, especially Google, seem to be on a daily diet of
change and their algorithm seems to be growing at the rate of their index.

The word ‘related’ plays a much bigger part in SEO today than it ever has in the
past. Instead of targeting an exact keyword phrase, it now makes a lot more sense
to keep your site within context and to have related words to your keywords,
compared to having density of one keyword phrase. Linking has also turned into a
frenzy for relevancy. Unrelated links seem to no longer carry much weight at all. The
theme through all of Google’s recent changes seems to come down to one cliché:
quality over quantity.

Just like with any other update at Google, optimizers must search and research their
profession, however it seems to be happening more often than ever. You can’t walk
through our office without hearing Google’s name a thousand times. We have
unofficial RND (research and development) meetings almost every hour as there
seems to constantly be new ideas and theories popping into all of our heads. In the
past there were always changes to the way we’ve done our work, but the pace of
this change is accelerating rapidly as well as the competition for online searchers.

MSN seems to be creating a buzz and they’ve just recently started a national
television ad campaign. Their search results resemble Google’s of 6 months ago, a
time that will go down in SEO history as “the good old days”, and also a time that
Google’s SERPs seemed a lot more relevant than they do today. New search engines
seem to be popping up all over the place, and after all, wasn’t Google a virtual
unknown 5 years ago?

One of the best points made to me over the past month came at the preview of the
new become.com search engine in California, where founder Michael Yang decreed
this to be only the very beginning in the history of online search. Whatever happens
in Google’s future, and the future of online search, there is one thing for certain:
only the most intelligent and innovative of SEO companies are going to stay above
the bar and continue to find ways to get their clients, and themselves, to the top.

Bobby Heard (bheard@abalone.ca) is the Vice-President of Abalone Designs (
http://www.abalone.ca), which offers great SEO results at affordable prices.

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