Recently Phil Laboon spoke at a meeting of the Pittsburgh SEO Group. Here is a transcript of his presentation.

How search has changed over the last 8 years.

Phil Laboon presentation seo

I have seen a lot of changes in 8 years of working in the search engine optimization industry. When I first started optimizing websites, I was typically dealing with very small clients that wanted huge results for not a lot of money. Many times if a client didn’t recoup their investment back in 30 days they wouldn’t continue to utilize my services even though the work I did would be permanent. This type of pressure made me become extremely efficient. It got me entrenched in the industry, learning every trick and loophole available. You see, back in 2001-2002 Google was still very clumsy and the majority of the smaller sites ranking were exploiting some type of loophole. Some of the most common tactics for tricking the search engines were:

Door way pages: This is when you have a piece of software scrape content from various sites and randomly combine content thus creating thousands of highly optimized back pages on a website in minutes.

Link Farms: Google has always been about back links but they haven’t always been great at determining the quality of back links. So people started realizing if they build hundreds of websites and inter link them Google would think a site was very popular and would rank it high within the results.

Keyword Stuffing: Probably the most widely used black hat SEO strategy in history. It was the art of stuffing keywords into your content over and over to the point where the page barely makes sense to a visitor – Or where you change the text color to blend in with the background – Or even tell the browser through code to move the content off the visible area of the screen so search engines index it but the user can’t see it.

These may seem like easy fixes but variations of these loopholes still exist to this day. Every time a search engine finds a way to counter a technique, another variation would pop up in its place and the whole process would start over. The reason that Google is often considered the best search engine is they are the quickest at finding solutions to these issues.

Where searches are going?

While I’m sure you are all interested in hearing me talk all day about the past, I’ll skip ahead and talk about the future and where I think search engines are heading.

Localized Results: One limiting factor search engines have always had is someone searching for a local service and getting results from the other side of the country. Imagine your house is flooding from a cracked water line and you search “emergency plumbing” only to find that you called a plumber in another state.

Google was the first search engine to really focus on putting local listings in the results with Google Local. You’ve probably done a Google search and noticed that a map popped up above the results showing the locations on the map. These are verified local businesses and they run off of a completely different algorithm then natural organic listings or their Pay Per Click Platform. I would suggest that any company that focuses on local business should optimize for all the new search engine local sites, as they are typically non-competitive and much easier to rank for. The reason they are easier to rank for is you don’t have huge national companies with large marketing teams filling up the results.

User Review and feedback: One trend that I think we are going to hear a lot about next year is how search engines are going to depend more on User Reviews from various community sites like Yelp, e-pinion, and their own locals. In the past, the great hurdle was spammers creating hundreds of bogus accounts and hyping up their own companies. However, with captcha technology growing and databases getting smarter it is becoming increasingly more difficult to trick the search engines. On top of that, search engines would still rely heavily on their tried and true algorithms and user reviews will be one part of a bigger equation.

Online reputation importance: One thing I haven’t noticed addressed much in the SEO industry is “online reputation importance”. Basically, what I mean by that is what comes up when someone searches your company.

It is similar to the user reviews only they are not actual review sites. They may be blogs, forums, or twitter posts. Anyone that knows search engines know that they rely heavily on “neighborhoods” and I think in the near future Google will start analyzes what other words are most commonly used when your company name is mentioned on a webpage and factor that into rankings. They are already doing this if a page links to you, but as their servers get faster I think they will analyze all pages and references.

For example:

If you are a computer company and you put a bad processor in your new line of computers and people blog / post about it everywhere, Google will see words like “overheat”, “busted”, “fried”, or even “FAIL” and effect your rankings accordingly.

Mobile marketing: When my grandmother talks about needing the internet on her phone you know it is time for search engines to take notice. The new age of smart phones and 3G are making it extremely easy for anyone to access the internet instantly at any time. In less than 1 minute you can get a 5 day weather forecast, check movie reviews, get a local restaurant suggestion, and view what roads are backed up with traffic. This is opening a whole new window for search engines as they are perfectly levered for this type of advertising.

My suggestion is for every medium sized business to brainstorm a free smart phone app. A piece of software you can offer for free to your mobile customers that they will want to utilize on a daily or weekly basis. The key is to make it as simple as possible so it doesn’t require a large amount of resources to update.

Here are some ideas our team has had:

Banks: A tool that checks if a client has X amount of cash in their bank account so they know before they go withdraw. Maybe limit it to common variables like $10, $20, $50 but not give any sensitive data in case the phone is stolen.

Restaurants: a quick app that gives you a rundown of the menu and current specials. Have a random “iphone special” where if they have the app they get a half off appetizer.

Schools: Give an interactive map of the campus with all the local hot spots emphasized or access to on campus web cams.

All of these ideas are quick and easy apps that would take a minimum budget to develop but could pull in a large amount of searches or viral marketing.

I’m now going to pass it off to Chris. He will be speaking about some of the ways Social Media is influencing search results. After Chris is finished we will open up the floor to Q&A’s and you can ask any questions you may have. Thank you.

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