SEO’s face a future of nearly insurmountable competition from huge established websites, and a decreased reliance on backlinks.
Search engine optimization professionals enjoy competitive advantages for ranking in the search engine results pages due to years of hands on experience, but experience, grit and force of will cannot always match giant budgets when corporations throw their hats into the SEO arena. There will always be opportunities for those grass roots marketers who do things faster and smarter, and future startups such as the Twitter.com in 5 years will contribute to disrupting the online marketplace, but the average company trying to make money with their web property will be up against daunting odds.
The Algorithm is a capitalist and is heavily reliant (currently) on back links.
Current Ranking Signals
- 24% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain
- 22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page
- 20% Anchor Text of External Links
- 15% On-Page Keyword Usage
- 7% Traffic and Click-Through Data
- 6% Social Graph Metrics
- 5% Registration and Hosting Data
Search engine algorithms change yearly, and have improved markedly since the 1990?s. Search engines have gotten so much more efficient at discarding low quality websites that most spammers have switched to ethical white hat online marketing tactics. In the near future, the distribution of ranking importance will change to favor larger, established, trusted brand name websites.
Future Ranking Signals
- 25% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain
- 24% Traffic and Click-Through Data
- 20% Social Graph Metrics
- 12% Link Popularity of the Specific Page
- 10% Anchor Text of External Links
- 7% On-Page Keyword Usage
- 2% Registration and Hosting Data
These ranking variables involved are getting more difficult for small companies, and small operators will have a larger challenge creating search relevance. It’s more difficult to create a successful viral marketing campaign to get mentioned on heavily read blogs for improving your social graph metrics. Brokering text links with carefully crafted anchor text will not only be more difficult but less effective.
Moving a website from nothing to top ten rankings for highly competitive phrases will less of a reality – If Ford.com can spend 1 million dollars on a social media marketing campaign, there is no way a smaller car operator can match them.
Google claims to be a champion of democracy, but their future search engine may send 75% of all query traffic to big brands.
Assuming that you rehash the same watchwords various times so your posts read in an unnatural way, Google will acknowledge that “pivotal word stuffing.” Doing this can really harm your site’s standing.