The following is a guest blog post by Jeremy L. Knauff from Wildfire Marketing Group, highlighting many of the recent changes to the field of SEO.

Marketing is constantly evolving and no form of marketing has evolved more over the last ten years than search engine optimization. That fact isn’t going to change anytime soon. In fact, the entire search engine optimization industry is headed for a major paradigm shift over the next twelve months. Like many of the major algorithm updates in the past, some people will be prepared while some will sit teary-eyed amongst their devastation wondering what happened and scrambling to pick up the pieces. Unlike the major algorithm updates of the past, you won’t be able to simply fix the flaws in your search engine optimization and jump back to the top of the SERPs.

Why is this change going to be so different? In the past, the search engines have incrementally updated certain aspects of their algorithms to improve the quality of their SERPs, for example, eliminating the positive effect of Meta tag keyword stuffing which was being abused by spammers. Anyone who has been in the SEO industry for more than a few years probably remembers the chaos and panic when the major search engines stopped ranking websites based on this approach. This time around though, we’re looking at something much more significant than simply updating an algorithm to favor particular factors or discount others. We are looking at not only a completely new way for search engines to assign value to web pages, but more importantly, a new way for search engines to function.

Local search

A number one ranking for a particular keyword phrase was once the end-all, be-all goal but now many searches are regionalized to show the most relevant web pages that are located in the area that you are searching from. While this will probably reduce your traffic, the traffic that you now receive will be more targeted in many cases. Additionally, it give smaller websites a more equal chance to compete.

Google suggest

This August, Google Suggest was moved from Google Labs to the homepage, offering real-time suggestions based on the letters you’ve typed into the search box so far. This can be an incredibly helpful feature for users. At the same time, it can be potentially devastating to websites that rely of long-tail traffic because once a user sees a keyword phrase that seems like at least a mediocre choice they will usually click on it rather than continuing to type a more specific keyword phrase.

Devaluation of paid links

Google’s recent attempt to eliminate paid links has scared a lot of people on both sides of the link buying equation into implementing the “nofollow” tag. In the midst of this hypocritical nonsense, Google has also been taking great measures to devalue links based on quantifiable criteria, such as the “C” class of the originating IP, similarities in anchor text and/or surrounding text, location of the link on the page and the authority of the domain the link is from to name a few. Regardless of the effectiveness of any search engines ability to evaluate and subsequently devalue paid links, the fear of getting caught and possibly penalized is more than enough to deter a lot of people from buying or selling links.

Visitor usage data

Again, Google is leading the charge on this one. Between their analytics, toolbar and web browser, they are collecting an enormous amount of data on visitor usage. When a visitor arrives at a website, Google knows how long they stayed there, how many pages they accessed, which links they followed and much more. With this data, a search engine can determine the quality of a website, which is beginning to carry more weight in regards to ranking than some of the more manipulatable factors such as keyword density or inbound links. This puts the focus on content quality instead of content quantity and over time, will begin to knock many of the “me too” websites further down the SERPs pages, or out of the picture all together. The websites that will prosper will be those that produce relevant, original content that their visitors find useful.

TrustRank

Simply pointing a vast number of links with a particular keyword phrase in the anchor text to a website was once a quick and easy way to assure top ranking. The effectiveness of this approach is diminishing and will continue in that direction as a result of TrustRank. In a nutshell, a particular set of websites are chosen (by Google) based on their editorial quality and prominence on the Internet. Then Google analyzes the outbound links from these sites, the outbound links from the sites linked to by these site, and so on down the chain. The sites that are further up the chain carry more trust and those further down the chain, less trust. Links from sites with more TrustRank, those further up the chain, have a greater impact on ranking than links from websites further down the chain. On one hand, this makes it difficult for new websites to improve their position in the SERPs compared to established website; one the other hand, it helps to eliminate many of the redundant websites out there that are just repeating what everyone else is saying.

Google Chrome

Utilizing a combination of visitor usage data and a not so gentle nudge in Google’s direction, Google Chrome is set to change the way search engines gather data and present it to users. For example, when a user begins typing in the address bar of the browser, they are presented with a dropdown list of suggestions containing choices consisting of the #1 result in Google’s SERPs, related search terms and other pages you’ve recently visited. This gives a serious advantage to the websites that hold top ranking in Google and at the same time, gives a serious advantage to Google by giving their Internet real estate even more exposure than ever before.

So the question remains, is search engine optimization facing evolution or extinction? Certainly not extinction, not by a long shot, but in a short period of time it is going to be drastically different than it is today. The focus will soon be on producing a valuable and enjoyable user experience rather than just achieving top ranking, which is what it should have been all along.

In years past Consumer Reports WebWatch studies showed that consumers struggled to differentiate ads from organic search results and that "more than 60 percent of respondents were unaware that search engines accept fees to list some sites more prominently than others in search results."

Since those studies Google has changed the background color on top ads from blue to a light yellow color that is hard to notice on some monitors. Changing my contrast setting from 50% to 55% it is hard for me to see the edge of the sponsored box...it simply bleeds into the organic search results. Google interviewed German searchers to ask if they noticed the yellow background on sponsored links and got a negative answer:

INT [interviewer]: “Why do the results on top have a yellow background, did you notice?”
TP [tester]: “I didn’t notice this.”
INT: “What does it mean?”
TP: “It definitely means they’re the most relevant.”

Google has done studies on the the brand lift of search, but it only tells part of the story. When one considers that

• many searchers do not know where the paid ads are,
• people will be searching more on mobile devices,
• maps and other verticals will eventually have ads integrated in them, and
• search suggestion services may show ads before the searcher hits the search results

...it is going to get much harder to compete for attention in big verticals unless you have the best visitor value and can afford PPC, or you build a formal partnership with the search engines.

To see where this is headed check out the Yahoo! Search results for a popular band, and see how Yahoo! turned their search results into a useful interaction AND an advertisement for Rhapsody - allowing searchers to play songs directly in the search results. Large portions of the search stream (lyrics, music, entertainment, sports) are going to be directly controlled by the search engines that keep users on their network longer and the second click.

* at least in the mind of searchers tested by Google and used in Google promotions to promote paid search advertising.

I just came across one of the funnier SEO emails I have ever read. When I shared it with my wife we both laughed out loud, so I thought I would share it with you. Personally identifiable information has been removed to protect the guilty.

Hi,
___________ are looking for sites that would be interested in publishing content on behalf of a number of the UK's major brands, including the likes of ________ and _________ and ___.

For a site such as ___________ we'd be prepared to pay up to £30 per article a month, every month, depending on the nature of the agreement.

Naturally, you would have a say in what content is placed on your site, we would simply provide you with useful, accurate and well written content.

To see how the links might look on your home page please visit _____________ (the articles are near the bottom of the page under the title ‘___________’).

The reason we are looking to pursue this relationship with you is because there are a number of sub-standard websites that are ranking higher in the search engines than our clients for their own products by using unethical techniques. It is our intention to address this imbalance and is why we are willing to compensate you on a monthly basis for the publishing of our content and links to our client's sites on your site.

If you feel this is an opportunity that you are willing to discuss further or if you have any questions about this proposition then please feel free to contact me.

Regards,
________ _______, Media Buyer

Generally by the time an SEO is experience enough to be working with Fortune 500s and big brands they are smarter than to buy into the bogus ethics debate. But what was funny is the ethical links they were buying in the example site were not even for brand related queries...some of the anchor text was for core category keywords like life insurance and loans. :)

It was pretty stupid for them to publish their clients (and a published site with link buying examples) in that email. If I would have fully published it without redacting information that probably would have made their rankings a bit worse ;)

That SEO firm claims to be award winning...I shall send them an email asking if they seek nomination for the worst link request email award.

When was Quintura launched? What gave you the idea to launch it? What problems were you trying to solve by launching it?

Quintura was founded in August 2005 and released its first search application in November of that year. One year later, we launched a web-based search. It was based on visual context-based search concepts that the founders had been developing since 1990s. Quintura was founded to solve several fundamental problems inherent with today's search engines. Those problems include too many irrelevant search results returned, no one reads past the first page of results; inability to manage or tune results by defining context or adding search scope; no means for users to graphically visualize search terms or manage their relationship/relevance. Quintura is designed to make it visually simple for searchers to find what they are looking for, and to make it easy for web publishers to expose the content their visitors are looking for.

You guys have got a lot of great press from tech bloggers. On the marketing front what are some of the biggest and most successful surprises you have encountered? What have you found to be hardest when marketing your search service?

The simple fact that there is a tremendous amount of interest in our technology and service, in spite of the large field of alternative search engines on the market. We've invested most of our time and efforts in research and development. Our biggest challenge has been in getting our first marketing message out, which is we're in the process of expanding now to mainstream media.

How do you guys generate the keyword clouds?

That's part of the magic behind the Quintura technology. At the heart of our technology is a semantic-based 'neural network' algorithm. The cloud is literally a depiction of those search terms laid out to show their contextual relationship. Since the graphic depiction is dynamic - (you are interacting with the search in real time) one of our design goals has been to develop the widget to be extremely responsive. Through the past year, we think we've reached that point.

Quintura is popular as a keyword research tool amongst many SEOs (I use it all the time). Have you thought about combining your service with search volume data and/or competitive research data to create a formal premium keyword research (or competitive research) service/tool?

We've been asked that several times, but for now, our goals are to provide the best consumer site search services to the market and to provide our search widget to as broad an end-user audience as possible.

Quintura makes boolean search easy to visualize. Do you think searchers will eventually start using advanced search operators more on general web search engines, or will most only use it when it is presented in an aesthetically friendly way like Quintura does?

The question is whether users want to become adept at boolean logic or would they prefer to have that hidden in the background. From our experience, users would prefer to focus not on the math but on the search itself - finding the most relevant results in the least amount of time. By laying out search terms contextually and graphically, Quintura helps users manage their search and be in control of their search.

When partners sign up for Quintura you guys create a custom index from a crawl of their sites. How many domains can be part of the same index? What sort of sites does Quintura's visual search work great on? Which ones are not as strong of a match?

There is no limit. We're glad to work with large web publishers directly to assure that we are indexing all important content as part of our site search solution. The publisher of several web-sites can create a “vertical” search engine based on the Quintura search cloud. Quintura works well with all web-sites that we have worked with to date including numerous amount of blogs. Though, our first major site search clients were lifestyle portals and lifestyle magazine web-sites.

Do you see the face/interface of general web search changing drastically in the coming years? How might it change?

The web is getting more visual. So is search interface. That’s the trend. We are enabling our content-publisher customers to be more creative through customization of the widget itself. We're also looking at ways to make the search results even easier to see through the use of even more graphics.

Does Google have general search locked up? What competitive positions might allow people to build out a strong competitor that can take marketshare from Google?

General search is mostly locked up with Google. In my opinion, the best way of taking a marketshare from Google is not by building a better search destination site, but by changing the paradigm – give reasons for users not to make a decision to go to a search engine. Because when the think search engine, they think Google. Essentially, what Quintura site search does is creating environments where users keep exploring the passions, their interests, their information needs from where they are on the Web. People go to search engines when they can’t find what they want where they are.

Chitika has created a fairly large sized behaviorally targeted ad network by targeting ads to the search query prior to people landing on a page. Your site search strategy seems like it could be a rather powerful strategy for building a strong network. How has growth been going? Do you have any interesting success stories from the publisher or advertiser standpoints?

Quintura currently powers site search for a monthly audience of 8 million site users. The tests are underway on various U.S. sites, including two major men’s lifestyle sites and an educational publisher. We plan to reach the audience of 50 million in 2009. You can see Quintura search widget on lifestyle sites Maxim.com, Passion.ru and Cosmo.ru; technology news sites ReadWriteWeb.com and Compulenta.ru, business community portal E-xecutive.ru; web-sites of consumer magazines Hilary Magazine, Russian Newsweek, ComputerBild, luxury news site LeLuxe.ru, in addition to hundreds of smaller web-sites and blogs that joined our affiliate program for site search. We have also approached several online advertisers including security software vendor Kaspersky Lab to advertise on our search widget network of sites.

What types of ads work especially well with a service like Quintura? Which ones are less strong?

We have tested both contextual search ads and display ads. We are going to blend search ads with display ads for more visual appeal. Plus, can target those contextual graphic search ads with much greater precision because of our context-based algorithm. Ads from companies with established brand logos benefit from our ability to graphically display their logos in the search cloud.

What areas does Quintura have a lot of inventory in?

It is in lifestyle and technology areas.

Many search engines (Google, Yahoo! Search, Live), large content & commerce sites (Amazon.com, eBay, Wikipedia), and browsers (IE8 Beta 2, Google Chrome, Firefox 3) are now adding search suggestions in the browser via the search box and/or address bar. Do you see this eventually evolving into a Quintura-like service?

It’s a helpful feature that is mostly based on search statistics. We go a step further by offering contextual suggestions. One of the greatest aspects of our display cloud is that it shows contextually-related results, and to depict them with a graphical element. Can you imagine a shoppng experience that lets you see related items in real time?

Quintura is currently powered from the Yahoo! index. Do you guys ever plan on creating your own web-wide search index?

As a matter of fact, we are already creating our own web index from individual indexes of web-sites where Quintura powers site search. Quintura site search on those web-sites is powered by search results from Quintura index of those sites.

How many regular users does Quintura.com have as a search destination? Do you guys intend to become a consumer search destination, or are you more focused on providing search for third party sites?

We focus on providing site search, analytics and monetization platform for web publishers and content owners. As a search destination, Quintura has less than 1 million users per month. We will continue operating and developing our search sites to provide the benefits of our search technology to users. For example, Quintura.com will evolve into an online research tool where registered users will be able to save and share their searches online with the other registered members.

You guys have a vertical search service for kids. Is that seeing good adoption? Do you plan on coming out with any other vertical search engines?

Children are far more graphically oriented and can grasp contextual depictions easily. It was a natural extension for us to offer a search engine designed specifically for children - Quintura for Kids. It's also a great test bed for us to further evolve search technologies while giving kids a hand. The search engine is used mostly in the elementary schools and public libraries in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Since its first launch in March 2007, several hundred school and teacher web-sites linked to Quintura for Kids. According to site statistics, the search engine has 70 percent returning visitors. 75 percent of visitors come to the site directly from a browser. In June 2007, Quintura for Kidswas ranked the highest among search engines for kids by Search Engine Watch.

We evaluate additional opportunities including licensing our technology to intranets and major search engines.

For now, our hands are full with upcoming site search product enhancements and monetization as well as  with our growing site search customer base.

Now that Peter Da Vanzo has joined the site, we have another writer and can spend a bit more time on the blog. In the past some of my most popular blog posts came out of feedback from readers. What topics would you love to see us cover?

Nearly any SEO/PPC/blogging/internet marketing questions are fair game (although we won't do site reviews, or explain specifically why site X is ranking or why site Y does not rank).