Over the last few months the SEO industry has been shaken up again, what with Google's latest updates. It seems like this is a habitual thing, but the trend, I think, is that SEO is going to be less of a thing on its own, and become much more a part of an integrated system of digital marketing.
I mean, if a few years ago you could get by building a site with maybe 10 pages of content and then spamming links everywhere, nowadays it's a lot harder to do that. Even things like guest posts are getting squeezed, which is alright it separates the wheat from the chaff. Long posts about nothing, just to get a link back to someplace, are probably a thing of the past and that's for the better.
It seems to me to be the case that SEO is getting merged and better integrated into the broader field of digital marketing. I predict that good SEO operators will also have to be strong writers, but who also have a mind for numbers and analysis of click-through rates, what strategies work best, etc.
Not necessarily a jack-of-all-trades, but the good SEO operators would be competent in several diverse fields of digital marketing. What Charles Floate is writing at godofseo.co seems to back my theory up. He talks about high-quality interviews, infographics, videos and guest posts forming the backbone of future content marketing. Not that this should come as a surprise to anybody, but the times when a site owner and operator could game the search engine algorithms by doing some quick black or grey-hat SEO are fast disappearing. Google is tightening the noose, and now only a prolonged, professional strategy will be able to keep up with the times. Google is getting better at recognizing crap, although they certainly have trouble with some things, like guest posting.
But, like I said the closer we get to Skynet, the harder it's going to be for us to fool the search engines with clever tricks, and the more we're going to have to learn how to write well and produce good content. It isn't that easy, but I think that, in the end, it's much more rewarding. Check out the abovementioned blog for some more info on this, it's really quite an interesting resource.
Ultimately, I'm ok with the changes that Google is bringing in I've been doing my best to improve my writing skills, and it is something that I've always been interested in anyway. The threat of Google finding me and penalizing my sites my sole source of income at the moment is enough of a motivator for me to play by their rules!
I mean, if a few years ago you could get by building a site with maybe 10 pages of content and then spamming links everywhere, nowadays it's a lot harder to do that. Even things like guest posts are getting squeezed, which is alright it separates the wheat from the chaff. Long posts about nothing, just to get a link back to someplace, are probably a thing of the past and that's for the better.
It seems to me to be the case that SEO is getting merged and better integrated into the broader field of digital marketing. I predict that good SEO operators will also have to be strong writers, but who also have a mind for numbers and analysis of click-through rates, what strategies work best, etc.
Not necessarily a jack-of-all-trades, but the good SEO operators would be competent in several diverse fields of digital marketing. What Charles Floate is writing at godofseo.co seems to back my theory up. He talks about high-quality interviews, infographics, videos and guest posts forming the backbone of future content marketing. Not that this should come as a surprise to anybody, but the times when a site owner and operator could game the search engine algorithms by doing some quick black or grey-hat SEO are fast disappearing. Google is tightening the noose, and now only a prolonged, professional strategy will be able to keep up with the times. Google is getting better at recognizing crap, although they certainly have trouble with some things, like guest posting.
But, like I said the closer we get to Skynet, the harder it's going to be for us to fool the search engines with clever tricks, and the more we're going to have to learn how to write well and produce good content. It isn't that easy, but I think that, in the end, it's much more rewarding. Check out the abovementioned blog for some more info on this, it's really quite an interesting resource.
Ultimately, I'm ok with the changes that Google is bringing in I've been doing my best to improve my writing skills, and it is something that I've always been interested in anyway. The threat of Google finding me and penalizing my sites my sole source of income at the moment is enough of a motivator for me to play by their rules!
