Reading the latest news about the top search engines speeding up new search offerings in the battle for supremacy, it caused me to consider the impact these changes will have on search engine optimization and search marketing programs. What I’m learning is that these changes will have significant impact on to how well your site will rank on the search engines in the next few months.
The biggest impact will not come from MSN’s Bing™ and Yahoo!® signing a deal, if approved by federal regulators that will allow them to share Bing’s new search engine capabilities. At issue is the reality that the search results seen on Bing will be the same results shown when searching on Yahoo!. Web sites that have not optimized for Bing will be at a disadvantage.
Keep in mind that Yahoo! is much more than a search engine with tons of content and online services. Although Bing’s name is being leveraged across other Microsoft content sites (farecast.com has become Bing.com/travel,) Bing is a search engine similar to Google®. Importantly, the algorithms and thinking that we previously used for Yahoo! search will no longer apply. The specific needs of Bing’s algorithm will be controlling your site’s search ranking on Yahoo!.
Google, not to be outdone has raised the bar by streamlining the search process to offer quicker and more relevant search results. We are seeing search results returned in half the time on the beta model of Google Caffeine. Our research is revealing that the new Google will focus on keywords as a more important part of its new algorithm (and we don’t mean the keywords contained in Meta data.)
These new search engine algorithms require more than just entering Meta data and page titles. Marketers must now be able to combine page formatting and page content to support high value keyword phrases. As a result, there will be more reliance on semantic organization and keyword-richness of the content. It also means that videos and Flash will need to be supported by alternate content that integrates the same type of organization and keyword-embedded content.
In looking ahead, Web sites that are not professionally optimized for search engines will suffer in rankings. Marketers can no longer rely on design-driven Web sites to deliver the ROI expected. With the increasing importance of Web marketing, companies must not risk their search engine optimization (SEO) to poorly trained or misguided designers and inexperienced agencies. If agencies don’t specialize in search engine optimization and provide the proof that they deliver results to many clients or have command of the latest standards, then marketers owe it to themselves to seek professional help (this last phrase is intended to have the double meaning you think it does.)
You can prevent your Web site becoming a casualty of the search engine wars. Start by choosing the right SEO partner that understands the changes in search engine algorithms and it will help you succeed as the major search engines battle it out.
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