Jill Whalen

++Recap of 2003++

from : ~~~High Rankings Advisor - Issue No. 081~~~

Back in January, I made some SEO predictions for 2003 <http://www.highrankings.com/issue038.htm#seo> . So let's take a look at how I did!

"SEO consultants will move more in the direction of 'fixing' existing pages of sites to rank higher, as opposed to creating new ones, due to the high level of long-term effectiveness this approach has."

I think we're at about the same place we were last year in regards to this. Although we did have a rash of new sites and cross-linking going on there for awhile. Not sure if Google's recent changes will take care of those once and for all, or not.

"The line between SEO and usability will become increasingly blurry, as many will realize that a people-friendly site is also a search-engine-friendly site."

There's definitely a lot more buzz about this lately. Usability was a hot topic in many of the sessions at last week's SES conference. Maybe soon we'll have a full-fledged usability session? Would be well-attended, I'm sure.

"Companies paying for full-service SEO will expect a total package that includes usability as well as copywriting for sales conversions and high rankings in the search engines."

I'm still not seeing that many clients asking specifically for this, but the more knowledgeable clients do expect this sort of package. The Web analytic software companies have certainly listened and have all come out with great new versions to help track conversions. This should make converting visitors to customers an even hotter topic in 2004.

"PPC will continue to grow in popularity, but so will the price tag. Bids for keywords on Overture and Google AdWords are already out of reach for many sites, and this will only get worse. This in turn will make 'organic' search engine optimization more popular than it currently is (and it's pretty darn popular)."

Being out of the PPC loop, I'm not sure if this has happened, but I have heard complaints about outrageous bid prices for some terms. I think what we're seeing lately are people learning how to use their PPC accounts more effectively. This should help keep the bid prices in check, assuming most of the bidders actually care about making a return on investment.

I'm not sure if the high bid prices helped organic SEO to be more popular this year either, because those that figured out how to tune up their PPC campaigns were able to spend unlimited sums and make it pay off. No reason to really use traditional SEO if you can get your PPC campaign to work for you. I imagine it takes a ton of study to get it all figured out, but once you do, it's a gold mine. [Listen to or read some of Kevin Lee's (from Did-it) stuff for more info on that.]

"For those willing to learn how to do SEO for their own sites, it will be cheaper than ever to optimize a site for high rankings in the 'regular' search results. "

This was in regards to my believing that paid inclusion really wasn't necessary anymore. I do still believe this is true, but the monkey wrench in the whole thing is that SEO totally exploded this year. Because of this it got a lot harder to obtain high rankings. Therefore, I don't think I'd still say that SEO is cheaper to do on your own site, because you have to have a lot more knowledge and really keep up with all the latest SEO happenings. SEO can certainly still be done for free, but the time involved is a lot more than it used to be.

"It will be more expensive to hire SEO consultants to optimize your site, as the good ones will have more work than they can handle."

Everyone I know is very busy, and rates are definitely not cheap. My friends at iProspect are charging as much as $250k a year these days!

"Google will remain the dominant player in the biz, with more and more *regular* people believing that Google = Search Engine."

That definitely happened. Many younger folks don't even know other search engines exist. This is great news for Google because even when some of their results stink (as they do now) searchers simply try to fix their search query instead of going elsewhere. "Regular people" that I've talked to about this have said that they have noticed that it's taking them a bit more work to find what they want with Google, but that they hadn't really thought much about it, and just figured they weren't doing a great job of searching. I'm pretty sure Google will fix the relevancy problem fairly quickly, but if they don't, my money is on Teoma to gain some ground. It's the only other major engine to not be inundated with poorly labeled ads, and it has some really great features that Google doesn't have. The only thing keeping me from switching to it completely is that it lacks the cache feature. I need my search query highlighted on the page so that I can quickly scan to see if the page is what I want. Come to think of it, I could use the highlight function of the Google toolbar to accomplish that too...hmmm...the irony! (Problem is, my browser isn't IE, and has no toolbar.)

"This newsletter will become required reading for every Webmaster in the world and will have at least 25,000 loyal subscribers by the end of 2003."

I am proud to say that last week I hit that 25,000 mark, so I was right on the money there! In fact, at the time of this writing, I'm up to 25,270.

Since I've already talked your ear off today, I'll save my predictions for 2004 until next time.