A couple of years ago I would have joined them – after all, what’s so hard about applying keywords to page titles and tags? Especially when raw link building used to be so effective?
However, a couple of key changes I think are turning the whole on-page optimisation into something much more high brow.
1. Google
Google has continued an absolute dominance of search, but has spent the past couple of years turning up the authority scoring aspect of their ranking algorithm up.
This has meant that more established sites can now leverage their content for ranking purposes much better .
Additionally, link building has become more content-oriented, with a focus on unique content syndicated to social media outlets to accelerate organic link development.
2. PPC
The search marketing industry includes both PPC and SEO, and as PPC marketing matures it’s dragged a lot of overall marketing theory and practice into SEO as well.
A focus on conversions and ROI means that SEO itself is no longer able to ignore these aspects in a campaign.
SEO Evolution
The overall effect is that you can make an arbitrary distinction as to two basic types of “on-page” SEO:
1. Old Skool
This is the basic application of search engine friendly processes: proper and relevant keyword titles and tags on pages, URL rewriting where necessary, and good keyword focused content.
The general gist is to improve search visibility and focus on ranking.
2. New School
This is an extended approach which applies the above, but looks beyond simply ranking to converting through a train of processes: Ranking, Enticement, Action, Sale (REAS).
Enticement is considering how the ranking pages look as an excerpt on SERPs for keyword rankings, and treating this like ad copy to try and improve on clickthroughs regardless of position.
Once the visitor arrives at the site, there’s the focus on delivering a Call To Action (CTA), and offering secondary options for dedicated visitors – all positioned in key viewed areas.
Sometimes simple experimentation of positioning can be used – those who earn from Adsense have usually have had to experiment with positioning and size of ads to find the optimum potential for revenue generation on each site.
It doesn’t have to be a blind process, though. Various tools for this include Crazy Egg, eye tracking (where the budget allows), or various Taguchi methods of testing.
The Sale aspect is tracking how Ranking and Enticement delivered an Action that resulted in a conversion. This is where key flaws can be isolated – for example, high CTA but low conversions means something is wrong – it could be anything from a coding error to issues of too high pricing.
Overall
Many SEOs are simply natural problem solvers who stumbled into the industry. As the search industry constantly evolves, SEOs find themselves faced with different problems to solve, then move onto the next.
The overall process is that this leads to an evolution of experience and knowledge all too easily taken for granted, as Danny Sullivan said best:
I am absolutely sick and tired of the SEO community forgetting that what they know and do is NOT second nature to the vast majority of people. I'm not talking spamming or black hat stuff. I'm talking about that "simple" stuff, the loads of things that can make a real difference to how well a site does in the search results. Ignore these things on purpose or accidentally, and you miss out on valuable traffic.
Yes, you can invest time to learn these "simple" things. But if you know nothing about them, they can see like rocket science. Over the years, I've talked with plenty of people who weren't even aware of the basic tip that every page should have a unique, descriptive title tag. They think "title" means the biggest text on the page, not the HTML title tag. Talk of HTML title tags -- that IS rocket science to them.
The bottom line is that SEO may have begun as a specific marketing application – but many SEOs, whether they either intend – or realise – it or not, are branching out into wider areas of marketing.
A process as simple as a concern for on site optimisation is fast maturing a generation of niche problem solvers into a generation of wider marketing specialists.
Good post Brian.
I (also) do agree the evolution of SEO/M is at some sort of crossroad, and there is a whole lot more going on than war of onpage optimization methods. There are simply too many kind of operations that are classified either as SEO or SEM activity. Possibly we'll see a new set of 3-letter acronyms (like SMO, SMP for Social media) and professions go mainstream in 2007.
However, what I'm worried about is the lack of skills the "new generation" is providing for customers under the noble title of SEO.... Some time ago I got acquainted with a person who does digg & other social media promotion for living (with guaranteed boost of search engine visiblity). But he had a problem - a customer of his was not showing in search results despite some successfull campaigns. After a while of poking I came across with very interesting finding: customer site robots.txt contained the magic line "User-agent:* disallow: /"... lol...
So the question is not entirely of SEO pushing to wider internet marketing, it is also a question of wider marketing moving towards SEO. And sometimes (as above) the consequences are *interesting*
Congrats to I, Brian. This is an excellent post. All SEO's should focus their optimization tactics all the way to the conversion for their clients. This process goes beyond basic on-page optimization skills to gain high rankings. It is an understanding of your target market, how they will interactive with your site once they arrive, and finally the enticement to get them to convert.
Thanks for the answer - randfish. I did some searches on Google.co.uk for "search engine optimisation." Interesting results.. Serps are full of organic and sponsored listings using that spelling, but Google still brings up the tip "Did you mean: search engine optimization"
I've stopped talked SEO to clients and now talk about visibility. SEO is part of being visible online -- but it all is so interconnected now that I can't just talk about one area anymore. I think it's really a dis-service to limit the discussion to just optimizing copy on a website or link building for SEO purposes.
I don't think clients care if we call it internet marketing, SEO, optimization, optimisation, visibility, or anything else. I think the point is that SEO is evolving into a larger industry that it was for the past few years.
Eventually there will be companies specializing in different specific services. Other companies will act as seo consultants and will function more as the brains behind the operations of SEO and will come up with the SEO blueprints that will be a plan that entails various specific tasks that that SEO consulting firm can then either get done through various partnerships and alliances or through in house operations.
Operations I believe are going to be outsourced for the most part to places like India and China, but the strategy is something that only marketers with good undestandings of meems and customers and their psychology can really master. If you have no clue about a certain market, even if you are able to rank for certain terms, there will be a disconnect between the searchers and the results and there will ultimately be a d/c in conversion and a low ROI. So as things evolve the metrics will be things like conversion and ROI and ultimately he or she who succeeds here will be the winner.
Ahem... I'm not trying to pick on you, but:
If compelling description and title tags are new school for you, then I'm sorry. Using these for relevance, attention and a call to action has been a cornerstone of fundamental SEO for at least 10 years. And then focusing on conversions after they land on the page. And then retaining their loyalty. And so on.
I think the overall sentiment is right on, I Brian, but calling it the new on-site optimization is pretty lame imho. Kind of like trying to make marketing a tool of SEO, rather than realizing that SEO is a tool of marketing.
I may differ from others, but I've always thought of SEO in terms of marketing - it is a facet of driving traffic, increasing mindshare, getting people talking, making sales once they're on the page, retaining their loyalty, remarketing etc. So on-page SEO stuff is just as important as good PR, linking campaigns, speaking gigs, social media, unique content, quality newsletters, etc.
Since more and more specialization has taken place in the industry (especially w/ the rise of PPC), it's pretty common to think of SEO in fractured terms. But it's most effective (at least it has been for me) to market in a unified manner using multiple methods and approaches. This probably makes me less of an "SEO" and more of a "marketer," but the distinction is critical for my approach. It's also the underlying message of this post, which is why I felt compelled to comment.
I think the unified approach is becoming more common as general SEO practice, hence the post - more declaration, than revelation.
However, there's still a perception from outside the SEO industry that it's just tags, nothing else.
"I, Brian" why do you spell optimization as "optimisation"? Is that for the SEO benefit of the misspelling or some other reason???
I believe that's the correct spelling in UK English.
Our UK friends would insist that "optimization" is actually the misspelling, not "optimisation."
Okay, my bad - will remember US English for SEOmoz in future. :)
Brian - no need; we're plenty happy to have the multi-lingual content. British spelling is, after all, originally the correct version :)
I think that it depends WHO is on your staff. There are lots of very small companies - and some individuals - who have no money to hire professional services but their primary asset is talent. They can do the blogs, news, and answers. And, in the start-up stages of their history they will struggle - but if they can keep this ball rolling they will soon become Mighty Mouse.
Although SEO is constantly changing and evolving I don't think you can suscribe conversions to a "new school" of seo. Maybe it's just semantics but seo to me is simply about driving qualified traffic to a web page.
What happens when they get to that point, IMHO is beyond the scope of seo. Don't get me wrong, I think those next steps are critical but they do not involve seo or even sem for that matter.
I agree the distinction is somewhat arbitrary - the point raised is that I see SEO's generally focusing less on simply ranking, as much as treating it as part of an overall conversion process to optimise where possible.
Danny Sullivan stated that even the basics of on-page optimisation can be difficult for some business owners to grasp and apply properly without guidance - and that's before they've even considered conversion issues.
The comment on Shoemoney I think tie very much with what Danny states - it's easy to forget that basic issues that become second nature to some, are not to others.
Overall, my impression is that SEO's are becoming far less "ranking only" orientated and turning into a new wave of general marketers. I think it's no accident that many SEO companies brand themselves as internet marketing companies that provide SEO, rather than simply SEO companies.
2c.
Funny I have a post queued about this very topic on my blog about the blurred distinction between SEO and general web marketing.
Personally I feel that SEO will (should?) become more about actually attaining stated marketing goals - in very few circumstances will traffic be a goal in and of itself. Conversions (of whatever) will be the metric of choice in the future for SEO (and I'm not entirely sure that 'SEO' will last as a title as the role progresses over time toward a more rounded discipline). Of course all the above is simply my opinion :)
A lot of "SEO" companies act a lot more like "Internet Marketing" Consultants, which is great for their clients if they correctly understand the web. Most expensive SEO companies do many of the tasks that would be traditionally (relative term) assigned to internet marketers. On the small end of things SEO is still just keyword research, onsite optimization (as in title tags headers etc) and then a lot of link building. Larger contracts and more competitive keywords have to be worked into / around the client's internet marketing strategy. For example if they don't have enough content and are not actively blogging etc, it may be impossible to rank them for competitive terms so as an expensive SEO you have to give them content ideas and work with them to mold their internet marketing strategy to the SEO process. That's my take anyways!
Yes, a very nice post indeed, so here's my 2 cents:
I think SEO relates directly to the needs of the client, so mixing old methodologies and new social marketing ideologies is a nice process, each rewarding and each having their own power.
Each campaign needs to be handled based on its industry as different factors can be prominent by industry and the SERPS. One example: if you take a term and 6 out of the top 10 ranked sites in Google are paying over $3500/month for the same network-wide text links, it would not take a brain surgeon to recommend this ad as an important factor in ranking for this industry and whether its too grey and you need to make the client one of the minorities in the SERPS and rank it without the ad. Then in other industries, there is no advertising and links are from unrelated sites, so we handle this differently then the other industry and consider linkbaiting or traditional link building as the industry dictates by the current SERPS.
Not every company has the resources to become "bloggers", "news makers", "question answerers" or "news posters", so we need to adapt and market or SEO around that or maybe just become another hit counter site. :)
I think in this case adaptation is the key.
Adaptation is key, and since Google is favoring content rich sites updated sites for most competitive commercial searches; clients and SEO companies have to adapt. Websites have to provide some type of valuable unqiue content or service. There is no place on the modern web for brochure websites or cookie cutter afflliate or shopping cart sites outside of regional specific (local) companies that are already marginzatized.
I believe that most companies that have the resources to hire an expensive SEO company like seoMOZ or seoimage have the resources to become "bloggers", "news makers", "question answerers", or "news posters".
They simply have to willing to adapt and use the resources they currently have to obtain the ones their search marketing campaign desperatley needs.
(warning: about to get very greyhat here) blog writting can be outsourced, content (including user generated) can be purchased, social media sites can be manipulated, aggregators can be influenced, and resources can be leveraged to obtain strategic partnerships. Most of the stuff above can be done extremely inexpensivley, even with quality levels that rival most major sites & portals.
It all depends on how far you're willing to adapt to the digital marketplace and how strong your "game of chess" is compared to your competitors.