With all the talk about search engines and relevancy, I came up with some interesting thoughts that I wanted share about where I believe the search engines are heading concerning basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Trying to stay ahead of the search engines, which is nearly impossible, I've been trying to look to the future of SEO while creating web pages following the guidelines of the major search engines.
One of the largest problems the major search engines are dealing with is Search Engine Spam, Adsense Spam, and "Spammy Pages" such as keyword stuffing to gain higher rankings. In guidelines from Google, they mention write your pages for the users, not for the search engines. This statement alone, is a little prediction of the future of what is coming. And in order to stay ahead of the curve with some long term planning, I am suggesting we should take this to heart, and stop using the older SEO methods that eventually will hurt us.
Websites are being currently being penalized and dropped from years of top rankings for not adapting to the search engines guidelines and continuing to use SEO methods of years ago.
In thinking in terms of long-term success to maintain high rankings for each of the major search engines, through about as much research as you do online, I have came up with a few guidelines to the basic SEO ideas for the future.
One of the most important aspect for the search engines, and what I have seen and predict will have more importance is website copywriting. We'll this is nothing new, we all know website copywriting is important, may as high at 45% of our copywriting contributes to our page rank. This will always remain important, and I believe will become even more important to high as 85% of what our website says will contribute to our page ranking in the future, as a shift from the search engine giving higher ranking from a technical aspect to more of a informational or relevancy aspect.
Eliminating some of the currently used technical aspects may maintain higher ranking in the coming future. Let me explain some of the commonly abused technical SEO habits currently, that I believe is headed toward extinction.
a. Keyword Meta tags. This tag alone is open to elimination due to the common abuse methods such as keyword stuffing. Most major search engines generally ignore this tagline currently.
b. ALT tags are another tagline that is just in the beginning stages of being eliminated. Some search engines have been experimenting with ignoring ALT tags and have found out that pages indexed without ALT tags are returning higher relevancy results. Again like the Meta tags, ALT tags have been abused to such from as keyword stuff.
c. The two Meta tags that will gain in importance will be the Title tag and Description tag. A title and description taglines accurately representing a well written website copy write will enhance your page's relevancy.
I am not suggesting that today that we immediately stop using the successful technical SEO currently in place, but the gradual elimination of this technique as the search engines stop using each method. Personally, I no longer include the Keyword Meta taglines on my web pages, and will continue to remove useless html as that become irrelevant.
In summary, my opinion is that future SEO standards will be more focused on good copywriting and less on technical aspects such as Meta taglines, Alt taglines, Headings to gain a higher page rank, or should I say higher relevancy.
About the author:
Erich Sweaney has been marketing online since 1999, and is the CEO for ES-Solution and affiliated sites.
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