experience matters

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to the Chicago Interactive Design and Development group (CIDD) about SEO.

The audience was made up of a wide variety of people with diverse knowledge and backgrounds, so tailoring the discussion towards one particular skill set was not possible. Instead I started by talking about the foundation of SEO and how the search engines work and a brief history of what the search engines algorithms are based upon.

The primary content of the presentation focused around the basics steps someone should take when trying to optimize their website, but the fun part came once we took at look at the future of SEO.

When it comes to site optimization there are 3 essential steps I discussed last night.

1)      Technical optimization – Ensuring that your site is free of roadblocks for search engines and is able to be crawled quickly and easily.

2)      Content Optimization – Once the site is fully crawlable, you want to present content in meaningful manner that includes keywords that users are looking for.

3)      Offsite Optimization – We want to drive traffic and spiders to the site from external sources. These sources would preferably be of high quality and related content to our website.

Now these steps are just a high level overview of what should be done to optimize your site for organic search, but they are the essential foundation of what has be shown to be an effective SEO strategy.

The closing portion of the presentation focused on the future of SEO and where it could be headed. The important thing to note about SEO is that it is constantly evolving and adapting to the changing world and new technology. It is critical to stay on top of the latest technology and web trends as there is a good chance that if it catches on, then Google will find a way to incorporate it in to its search results or algorithm in some way or another.  Two emerging trends that we looked at are:

Real-Time Search

Google is now incorporating up to the minute information pulled directly from sites like Twitter. This shows that the search engines are aware of the increasing demand for information on demand. The question is how can this be leveraged for your site? Does your site have consistently fresh, up-to-date content that could be a potential source of information that the search engines could pull in to their organic search results? Even if the content isn’t directly on your site, maintaining a social networking presence on a site like twitter can allow you to not only have your main site appear in search results, but also your twitter feed. Search engine optimization continues to expand well beyond the standard web page result. It’s a matter of optimizing all of your site assets to take advantage of these changes.

Mobile Search

Mobile devices are quickly over taking the PC as the primary computing platform in this country which means more people are now using their smart phone to access the web than ever before.  The algorithm for mobile search results is different from the standard algorithm with an increased focus on location based information. Does your business have a physical address? If so, are you making this information readily available to search engines so you can get the most of mobile search? Mobile search best practices will typically follow standard best practices with a heavy reliance on HTML text, but it’s the slight differences that are still being uncovered that can make all the difference in how your site performs in mobile search.

What other trends are you seeing? Or what SEO questions have you scratching your head lately? We had lots of question and a nice long conversation after presentations last night. Feel free to comment down below to turn this post into more of a discussion as well!

Richard is an SEO Manager working on Infiniti and Moen out of the Critical Mass Chicago office.