Last week I had the pleasure of attending a webinar on SEO 2.0 by More Visibility, a premiere search engine marketing agency. I’m always amazed at how technology is pushing the envelope in business communications towards greater efficiency but I wasn’t prepared for the interactivity of this webinar.
The webinar, to the user, feels like watching an online power point presentation listening to someone speaking over conference software, but Im sure the presentation side of this application was much different. I had no idea how many people were also attending this event. It didn’t matter as all mics from attendees were muted. Comments could be sent back to the host via text messages and at the end of the webinar questions were selected and answered.
Among the best information I got form the webinar was an understanding of the differences between SEO 1.0 and SEO 2.0. In SEO 1.0 optimizers and webmasters were being informed by search results and in SEO 2.0 these same people are feeding the search engine to get results. I know that founds fishy. Its sounds like they were about to list bullet points of tactics to use like packing your key words and hacking the search engine to make it do what you want, but that’s not what I mean…
With the decline of page rank and the rise of personal searches it will be increasingly hard to monitor being number 1 in search results. Further, being number 1 on my search may not coincide with being even number 10 on your search. This is partly because of the immense personalization of Web 2.0 applications such as: myspace, netvibes, flick-r, and digg, etc that allow users to customize their experience.
What will become increasingly important will be a new system called trust rank which will have to do with how long your site has been there, who links to you, and how many people click on links to your site. The numbers for your site may never be published in the same way that page rank was to prevent people from doing trial and error tests until they boost the ranking. Couple this with the above mentioned personalized searches and optimizers going to be in a tricky place. This is not to say we will be out of a job, far from it, as we’re likely to be the only people who will be able to make sense of this madness, but I do think the job will change drastically.
In SEO 1.0 it was enough to know the code and how to use it. SEO 2.0 will be much more focused on old school marketing techniques in new ways. The 1.0 way to get the word out was a newsletter, the 2.0 corresponding technology is a blog. If you wanted a tech support for your product the best thing you could do was have a FAQ with an email address for harder questions on your site; In 2.0 you’d be a fool to not offer a wiki to your customers so they can not only ask questions but get responses from some of the most knowledgeable people using the product, your other happy customers.
Sadly, there will be no way out of the Catch 22 new sites will face: You don’t get a high trust rank without traffic coming to your site, and without a high trust rank, how will you generate hits? Solution: old school marketing campaign done anew with blogs, wikis, press releases, and pay per click ads replacing direct mailers, newsletters, and magazine ads.
