SEO innovation and trends interview – Andrew Girdwood of Bigmouthmedia

In this interview we look at the major SEO trends and innovation including personalised search, social media, vertical search and paid linking.

With thousands of posts weekly on the main search engine marketing portals like SearchEngineLand and compilations of "€˜must-read"€™ search blogs numbering in the hundreds, it can be tricky to spot the changes which will make a real difference to your search engine marketing efforts.

In this interview, I talk to an expert who has to sift through the seo blogs and identify the developments which will make a real difference to his clients. Andrew Girdwood is Head of Search at bigmouthmedia who as part of the Global Media Group have hundreds of search marketing clients from SME's to major global brands.

Andrew has been in Search for over nine years and at bigmouthmedia is responsible for Search strategy, the coordination of Paid and Organic Search, the coordination of Search and Affiliate Marketing and the use of Search as the glue that holds online marketing activities together and extracts maximum value from them. He comes from a technical background and has an honours degree in Computing Engineering.

The questions:

There's just one question this time around. Andrew, if you had to pick 5 developments or trends in search engine optimization (SEO) which should concern marketers and site owners client side, what would they be? For each, please explain the issue, why it is important and some approaches that should be trialled.

SEO trends and innovation - Andrew Girdwood's viewpoint

Thanks for inviting me to participate Dave. Let's get started on what may well be slightly
controversial.

SEO Trend 1. Personalised Search

There is certainly a trend emerging from the search engines to move towards
personalised search results and therefore this is something marketers need to be aware of.

I say this may be controversial because my feeling is that some SEO consultants have their
head in the sand a little bit about this. I heard one SEO speaker at Internet
World tell his audience that it was years away. I believe that Personalised
Search is here today.

Very many people now have an account with Google. These are GoogleMail users, iGoogle users, Google
Calendar users or even Google Talk users. When you are logged into Google (you've just been checking your GoogleMail, for example) and you do a Google search then the chances are high you are either being shown a
personalised result or Google is collecting information so that it can personalise your next search.

What does this mean for marketers? Keyword strategies should allow for personalised results. It may
be appropriate to grow the number of keywords targeted so that users have a greater chance of finding your site and are therefore more likely to show Google a "personalised preference" for your site. On the other hand, it may be that the SEO campaign needs to ensure that an elite core of keywords are promoted and protected.

Personalised Search also encompasses personalised search home pages such as MyYahoo and
Google's newly rebranded iGoogle. Savvy affiliates and fast moving brands have already published their own Google Gadgets.

SEO Trend 2. Social Search and Media

Search engine optimisation campaigns are dedicating a growing proportion of their effort towards the social media landscape. If your site is linked to from hundreds of blogs then not only are you being mentioned across the internet but you could also benefit from hundreds of links in the eyes of link weighing algorithms like Google's.

The social media landscape is not new - blogs have been around for many years, social news sites like digg and reddit were established in 2005 and the social bookmarking site Furl was established in 2003.

The trend towards serious marketing activity in, around and with respect to these sites
is new, though.

Marketers are watching how powerful the collective "buzz" around these sites can be. Social
media campaigns are being used to protect and support brands by ensuring that
important messages are seen.

SEO Trend 3. The Link Debate

One might imagine that an easy way to get bloggers to link to a site is to pay the
blogger to do so. In fact, if you wish to foster positive reviews of your
product along with keyword rich links then you can buy a glowing review.

There is no shortage of people who do this and there are third party services which act as
a marketplace for the "pay for review" concept.

There are search engine optimisation agencies who strongly
believe that the search engines do not and should not have any concern with
this approach. The argument is that this is one form of advertising. Another
argument is that the search engines should be able to cope with whatever
happens on the Internet and adjust.

The popular blogging platform WordPress has banned the "pay
per post" model from its system.

Through their own influential bloggers, the search engines
are increasingly making noises against buying links in this way. A senior
Google engineer used his blog to encourage web users to report all link buyers
and link sellers to report the activity as spam.

One possible solution to this issue is an attribute called
"nofollow". When applied to a link the "nofollow" attribute tells the search
engine that this link should not be counted as a vote.

The argument from the search engines and nofollow supporters
is that this allows advertisers to advertise with text links if they so desire
but that these text links disclose themselves as an "advert" to the search
engine.

SEO Trend 4. Specialised Search

Google is very keen on mobile as a future technology. We
have a trend towards more mobile search and mobile functionality from all the
search engines. Yahoo's oneSearch has been quite successful in the States and
was recently launched in Europe.

We will see a trend towards more video advertising online.
This trend will spread across video hosting sites like YouTube, video finding
search engines like Yahoo Video and new video media such as Joost.

Vertical searches continue to grow in their niche. Yahoo
Travel is significant in the States and slowly growing in influence in Europe. Google Finance recently upgraded and Google
Health is due to launch.

SEO Trend 5. Joined Up Marketing

There is certainly a trend for SEO campaigns to coordinate
with other marketing activities. Coordination between SEO and PPC is pretty
much a given these days; keyword targets and success metrics shared between
campaigns.

Increasingly, SEO coordinates with TV and radio. If a
significant offline campaign creates memorable catchphrases or interest in a
new type of product then the SEO campaign is there to ensure that the right web
site benefits from the extra searching and traffic.

There is also a trend to ensure that the SEO element of a web site is brought in
sooner and given more importance. They say that commercial web sites tend to
have a three year life cycle. Three years ago, too many marketers added SEO on
as a "marketing option" after a web site had been finished. These days an
increasing number of web sites are built, from the ground up, with SEO in mind.