Interview with David Wallace about SEO and its Future - 6/15/05

We started doing SEO back in 1997 on one of our own sites, The Arizona Builders’ Zone (www.builderszone.com), because we had no money to advertise the site and therefore depended on the free traffic search engines could send us. It wasn’t called SEO back then. Mostly it was referred to as search engine positioning and submission. Because of our success in getting ABZ positioned well, we began to offer the services to our clients in conjunction with the web development services we provided. Eventually we launched a separate brand for our search engine marketing services, SearchRank, and today SEM is our primary focus of business.

The general purpose of our web site is to first of all introduce people to SEM/SEO, secondly convince them that they need this for their sites if they are to be successful online and finally to get them to either ask additional questions or submit an RFP.

One of the biggest changes occurred when Google came on the scene with their PageRank algorithm. Before that, getting sites positioned well in search engines mostly consisted of “on the page” optimization factors such as optimizing title tags, meta descriptions tags, even keyword meta tags! Now with the popularity of Google, it was about getting links from good quality sites in addition to on the page SEO. This of course has lead to an abuse of the PageRank algorithm as people have scrambled to set up massive linking campaigns that go against the natural order of one site linking to another simply because they find it a worthwhile or beneficial site. PageRank was effective in Google’s beginning to make their results more relevant than other engines but now because of widespread and constant abuse, PageRank has outlived its usefulness in my opinion.

I do not necessarily think the art of “optimizing” web sites will change much but I think the service offerings of SEO “firms” will continue to evolve. What I mean by this is that firms or individuals offering SEO services will have to continue to evolve in their service offerings. Whereas one used to be able to optimize a few title tags, add a meta description here and there, maybe develop a keyword meta tag and as a result see a site rank well, nowadays, SEOs have to take many other items into perspective. Effective keyword research, site usability, good SEO copy, link popularity building, dynamic site issues and good conversions/ROI are all essential ingredients in any search engine marketing campaign. I feel that traditional SEO firms who do not adapt to offer these services to their customers may cease to exist in the near future.

I would say the biggest reason why sites may fail is their inability to convert visitors to customers. It may be in their site’s usability or the fact that their copy is not compelling. It may be their product or service itself. Right behind that would be a site’s lack of visibility. Build it and they will come does not work on the Internet. One has to promote their site whether that be via natural search listings, pay per click or traditional means of print, radio and television advertising but more importantly they have to convert those visitors into paying customers.

That is difficult to answer. There are so many different “things” that people and companies do out there that it is really all over the place. There are no standards for doing SEO such as there is with HTML for example. Our methodology could be viewed as very different from many firms or not that different at all from many others.

I hate all spam but have to say that domain spam bugs me the most. Whether a person has several mirror sites (the same site spread out over a number of different domains) or several different sites that essentially have all the same purpose, the end result is that it litters the Internet. As a searcher I hate coming across useless pages or seeing a particular company hogging the search results because they have set up a kabillion sites that while they are slightly different, all essentially serve the same purpose.

Forums such as Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Forum (http://www.highrankings.com/forum/), Search Engine Watch Forum (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/) and Robert Clough’s Small Business Ideas Forum (http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com/forum/) are awesome places to participate in a community where you can teach, share or learn.