Blog Post Update (2013-11-15)
You can watch the entire webinar online.
The Sand Keeps Shifting
Do the shifting sands cause you problems or give you success?
Back in the wild west of the early days of SEO and search marketing, things were pretty simple. Throw a few links and a few keywords in your copy or meta tags, and life was golden. Adoring fans would come beckoning at your door, eager to throw money at you.
Well, OK, maybe not quite THAT easy.
In today’s online world of marketing, it’s far more complicated than that. Google’s Panda and Penguin have had major shifts in the way we publish our content online. Penguin 2.0 has had major shifts in the way links are counted, when “in the olden days”, links were gold. Social media has complicated things because you can’t easily measure your reach or your ROI (return on investment). Be sure to listen to David Meerman Scott’s rant on ROI – I actually never tire of hearing it.
Google is constantly experimenting with new things. Remember Google Wave? It was pretty cool, but no one could figure out what the hell to do with it. It was actually Google’s first foray into the social media realm. It had some cool features, it just didn’t stick. Out of that was begat Google+ after Facebook refused to let them into their system. Google+ created a new platform for us to share and link and hashtag, and created Google Hangouts. Google Authorship? Yes, it was indelibly linked to your Google+ account, but that project was closed last month. Is it still valuable? Probably.
Google tags were awesome, until they pulled the plug on them.
Structured data is another new thing – not invented by Google, but I’m still not convinced they’ve got it all correct. It’s certainly a pain in the keester to implement, and the jury’s still out on whether it makes a significant impact on search results, clicks and oh yeah, that ROI thing again. Even their free markup tool doesn’t seem to work in a way that they can recognize their own tags.
Are you confused yet? Me too.
As business owners, online marketers, SEO novices or experts, it can be pretty darned confusing on what you need to do to get ahead in the online world.
Free Webinar Wednesday
This Wednesday, at 10:00 a.m. PST/1:00 p.m. EST, my friend Eric Cook and I will be talking about how all these shifting sands make us feel pretty shaky when we’re trying to put some marketing content out. What’s the best practice? What should we do or not do?
I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers, but I think it will be an interesting discussion.