It’s easy to get caught up in how a page is ranking and whether it’s doing better today than it was a month or six months ago. But search engine algorithms are in a state of near perpetual evolution and so it’s vital that you also concentrate time and effort on following trends and determining how a page is likely to perform in the future and what can be done now to improve those future results. There are many factors to consider and the most efficient SEO will look at historical data, patent applications, major search updates, and many other sources of information.

Search Engine Market Share

One trend that has remained constant for sometime is the domination of the search market that Google has over all of its competitors. In the UK, we use the google.co.uk and google.com search engines for around 75% of all searches we conduct, and rather than making any ground, the other two major search engines (Yahoo and MSN) have recently seen the lead broaden.

Topically Relevant Keywords

Other more recent but vital changes have included the reliance on topically related keywords. Google and Yahoo in particular employ a degree of semantic indexing when crawling and ranking pages. This means that as well as considering the primary keywords on a page, they will also look for supporting keywords. Google takes this a step further and considers semantically related keywords when judging the prowess of your link profile.

Universal Search

Universal search is another big step. Search engine results no longer display just a list of the 10 or 15 most popular pages based solely on textual content. Video results, news results, blog results, and image results are now displayed too. This method of universal search has opened new doors for the site that is willing to broaden and expand its SEO efforts into optimising all the content on a page.

The Social Internet

Social media and social networking have, to an extent, become the new search. Many people log on daily to use social sites like MySpace, YouTube, and Bebo. Search engines have again twigged to this popularity and some are believed to use them as a further indicator of how popular a website is. At the very least they can be used to help build links and generally improve search engine results if they are used properly.

Blogging For Business

Another side of the social web, and one that has been popular for longer than social networking sites, is the blog. Blogs became popular because they provided everybody with a relatively simple and affordable means to start their very own corner of the world wide web. Businesses and websites geared strictly towards profit making can again use blogs to their advantage.

Search Engine Optimisation Trend Spotting

Monitoring search and Internet trends should be a major part of any SEO campaign because what might seem initially like a simple or small change could be a sign of major changes in the future. Search engines routinely change and improve their algorithms in order to ensure that they continue to offer their users the best possible search engine results.

When it comes to SEO for your website there are two basic choices – do it
yourself or employ an SEO service to do the work for you. While doing it yourself
potentially offers one big advantage in that it costs nothing, it could actually
cost you more than you think in the long run. Professional SEO services need
to keep up to date with the latest techniques and changes in the SEO industry.
They also have the experience of having dealt with many websites before and
can apply their findings from other projects to your own.

Changing SEO Techniques

A major part of SEO is keeping abreast of changes in techniques and the SEO
industry in general. What might work this week, may become an obsolete and
ineffective SEO method in a month. Yahoo might be ready to implement a major
change in their algorithms that will see hundreds of thousands of pages drop
from their top spots. Google might be about to blacklist a particular product
and implement an algorithm update that penalises sites that use this technique.
An SEO service helps ensure that you don’t fall foul of these services.

Knowledge Is Power

SEO services also have the expertise and knowledge to perform all of the various
tasks associated with effective search engine optimisation. Starting afresh
to do the work on your own site will require a lot of research before you even
have a basic understanding of the topic. Considering that Google state they
consider over 100 different factors when ranking a page, it will take months
or longer before you have adequate knowledge of the subject.

You Can’t Buy First Hand Experience, Or Can You?

Perhaps one of the biggest differences in using a professional and doing it
yourself is experience. Experienced companies have worked with hundreds of
different websites, and have employed many different techniques to the pages
of these sites. They know the most effective techniques, as well as those that
require a lot of time for very little reward. While you can’t buy this level
of experience, you can certainly pay for somebody with that experience to do
the work for you.

Learning On The Job

SEO can be done in house but it requires a very specific set of skills that
your SEO either needs to already know or has to learn. Putting a foot wrong
won’t necessarily just mean poor results either because using unethical or
black hat SEO techniques can lead to a website being penalised or even banned
by the search engines and ignorance is not considered a good enough excuse
by the search engines.

SEO Services

As far as Internet marketing goes, SEO is one of the cheaper and often most
effective methods. Using a professional and experienced SEO service helps ensure
that you get the best results without paying an unexpected premium for attempting
to do the work yourself. It also helps ensure that your pages are optimised
for all search engines and using the latest proven techniques.