SEO: A Career with a Future - Challenges of an Evolving Field
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The first two letters in SEO stand for “search engine,” and SEO is dependent on the search engines. Search engines evolve. Techniques of increasing traffic and raising your site’s position in the SERPs that were once considered legitimate can now get you penalized. Factors that search engines once considered important are now all but ignored, such as meta tags. So good SEOs must evolve right along with the search engines. That being the case, anyone doing SEO must spend a lot of time keeping up in the field.
One contributor to the SEO Chat forum suggests spending a lot of time in SEO forums, asking a lot of questions, then coming back several times a day and doing it all over again. He suggests this as a daily ritual. He goes on to tell newcomers to “Tick the box that says to notify you when one of your posts is answered, subscribe to your most important threads and actually read them,” and set up Google alerts for important SEO terms such as “Matt Cutts” and “SES Conference” for openers. “Learn about blogs, technorati, Diggs. Become a member of 6-10 forums and make it a daily ritual” to visit them. “Pick your most respected members out and either chase them or get notification when they post and read their stuff.”
Also, the focus of SEO is starting to change. While it is still important to score high in the SERPs, SEOs today should be able to attract traffic to a web site using a variety of methods. And it’s not just about the traffic anymore, either. Many clients are more concerned with ROI; because of this, they’ll not only want to measure traffic, but conversions. It’s more challenging to raise conversions than traffic.
Some who have been in the field for a long time see even bigger changes coming. EGOL, a veteran SEO and well-respected moderator on SEO Chat, notes that search volume is going down for a lot of the terms in his fields. He believes this is because sites such as WebMD and Wikipedia are becoming one-stop shops where visitors can find an enormous amount of information right at their fingertips. This reduces the need for web surfers to use search engines. “If you think that search will always drive the traffic on the web you might be wrong,” he explains. “However, the thing that will remain – at least for the short term – is the need to develop and improve websites. So if you think you can make a life-long living by tweaking title tags and hunting links, I think that you have a bad model.”
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