4.6. SEO Trend Spotting

SEO trends move fast, so it's OK to jump in where you are! Use this primer to get clued in to some of the current jargon and trends in SEO.

Universal or blended search Remember when the search engines used to deliver three lines of text and a link for every listing? If you wanted vertical search results like video, image, shopping, and maps, you had to click on a tab or perform a special search.

Now the major search engines have blended all types of listings together in the standard search results. This may create additional exposure opportunities for your site if it has well-optimized video or image listings. On the flipside, it leaves fewer spots for the standard text listings.

Search engine transparency Don't expect search engines to open the black box and shine a light on their secret algorithms, but all of the major search engines now offer some form of two-way communication between official representatives and the developer crowd. Tips and news are delivered—and questions are answered!—in blogs and forums, and webmaster tools take the guesswork out of some indexing and listing issues. Those of us who practiced SEO in the Stone Age get a big kick out of seeing the enmity that once existed between the search engines and webmasters begin to dissolve away.

Smarter robot meta tags The trend of search engine transparency has translated into some new tags that you can place on your page to make special requests of the robots that visit your page. Besides controlling whether a page is indexed, website owners can also control whether a snippet is shown, and even whether a page is cached. Visit yourseoplan.com/meta-tags.html for links to how-tos and FAQs.

Widgets Sometimes touted as the future of marketing, widgets are applications that are created with the intention of being reused on other websites. You've probably seen them: News websites allow you to display headlines on your site, and YouTube allows you to embed videos in your blog. There is an endless variety of widgets: Users can create reader polls, display upcoming speaking engagements, or even post AMBER alerts on their site. As a marketer, widgets give you the advantage of putting a little bit of your organization on a lot of different websites. Once site owners have added your widget to their site, your widget could push new content (images, quotes, videos, and more) with no effort at all on the site owner's part. Still not sure what a widget is? Widget directories such as Snipperoo or Widgetbox have a wealth of examples to get your creative juices flowing. Tracking usage and ROI of widgets is a challenge, but thanks to the beta launch of event-tracking features in Google Analytics in late 2007, widget tracking is becoming more sophisticated.

Social search Social search refers to websites that allow users to recommend web pages to each other and influence search results. On social news sites like Digg, stories that receive the most votes win the most visibility and clicks. On social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, people tag sites with keywords so that other people will find them. Social sites offer seemingly limitless opportunities for website promotion—and plenty of sites have basked in extreme, server-busting popularity via social search. But this type of promotion isn't easy and the results are unpredictable.

Mobile search Mobile search is like one of those up-and-coming neighborhoods that never quite ups and comes. Web developers are still working out the kinks of building websites in formats that can be viewed on cell phones and handheld devices. Meanwhile, search engines, most notably Google and Yahoo!, are working hard to place themselves in the middle of this growing search sector. The SEO community remains on the sidelines, watching and waiting to see if mobile search will ever fully take off.

SEO Slang

Just like any other topic with a big online following, SEO has its own colorful vocabulary. There are far too many terms to include here, but here's a sampling of what you might come across in your own SEO endeavors:

SERP An acronym that stands for "Search Engine Results Page," that is, the listings you see when you use a search engine. It is our opinion (as it is with other right-minded folks) that this acronym has an ugly ring to it, so we've decided to ban it from the book!

White hat/black hat Stereotypically speaking, white hat refers to "squeaky clean" optimization activities, ones that stay squarely within the search engines' guidelines. Black hat refers to under-the-radar (and often below-the-belt) activities, such as quickly launching a site with poor-quality, scraped, or no content; making some quick cash; and then dumping the domain and starting over with another site. There are also SEOs who proclaim to be gray hat, who do their work somewhere in the middle.

Link Juice If you're one who likes to use the word "juice" to mean "power," then this is the expression for you. Link juice is a synonym for link equity or page authority, the accumulated measure of a web page's value in the eyes of the search engines based on the quality and quantity of its inbound links. As the expression implies, link juice is fluid, and can flow between web pages via links.

Splog The word splog is a mashup of the words "spam" and "blog." A splog is a blog that exists solely to get ad impressions or provide links to other sites. Usually these blogs contain gibberish, or an unruly combination of content stolen from other websites.

Long Tail As you attempt to bring traffic to your website, you can optimize your site for general, popular keyword phrases, or you can choose longer, more specific, less popularly searched phrases. The former may bring you a large volume of general traffic, while the latter, the long tail of search, may bring you fewer visitors that are highly targeted. This term was popularized by Chris Anderson in his book The Long Tail (Hyperion, 2006).


Now that you've had your fill of background knowledge, join us in Part II where you'll create an SEO strategy that will set you on the right track for Your SEO Plan.

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