There has been a lot of talk recently about the Future of SEO, there has always been the “SEO is dead/going to die” side of discussions which obviously we don’t agree with, i’ve never seen a half compelling argument for this and while ever search exist search optimisation will be needed.

This isn’t to say changes are in store however, Rand did a post Friday over at SEOMoz looking at his opinion of the future of SEO and I thought I would give my professional response to Rand’s ideas as well as some of my own.

Here’s the video for you to watch first, it’s less than 10 minutes long so don’t worry about a lecture.

Let’s look at the points Rand raises first.

Content and Accessibility will Remain Important

I am confident Rand is right about this one. Controlling quality ocntent and managing site accessability is one of the most important roles in SEO, increasingly websites are become very large and complex and it takes a lot of time, planning and expierence to correctly structure sites and keep them accessible to everyone (and bots).

As new trends develop site maintenance will become a larger task and things such as semantic tagging (not LSI) more advanced sitemaps and robots control will be important.

Content will remain an important part of SEO but I expect we will begin to see a more vaired base of content being important. The changes in the last year alone with Google now indexing Flash and Java has shown SEO’s we don’t just have plain text to play with. This technology will only become more capable and accurate meaning web technologies like Flash much more accepted by SEO.

As Rand mentions this has to be an important part of SEO as it’s an imoprtant part of internet marketing in general and the future of the web.

Social Graph Metrics

Rand moves on to discuss social graph metrics and the potential impact it will have on search. Again I agree with Rand on this one on the basic point that it will be something search giants are interested in but the overall effect on queries and results will be small.

The value in presenting people with “super personalised” results is minimal and just like in Rand’s example you are not always going to want to see the thing people around you are talking about top of the SERPs. Rand is also correct in the fact the system is too easy to game, if SE relied solely on community interaction to predict what people want in the SERPs quality would plummet for both them and the communiteis themselves.

I personally see this evolving more as a supplementary search option, similar to “images” or “video” a section almost themed “what my peers think” is a possibility. I’m not sure how this will be presented but i’m confident it will not encrouch into the main algorythm.

User Metrics

User Metrics is more of a complicated point. There are a lot of theories stating these already have an impact on ranking. Rand suggests that they will be incorporated into SEO and ranking algorithms more in the future.

I think while this makes sense and it is likely Google will use Analytics data to influence rankings it will never be a major factor for one reason, not everyone use analytics.

It would be impossible for Google to sort out all the websites into ranked order if only 30-40% are giving the the data they need. It would also mean that “having analytics” would give you a statistical advantage or disadvantage in the SERPS (depending on your site and how they work it) and therefore people would have alternative motives to using it.

User metrics can be valuable however and I think that in the long run you may at least start to get WMT feedback on issues that can harm site rankings.

Verticalis

The major point Rand ends on is the concept of verticals developing in the SEO world or at least becoming much more prominent.

This is something a lot of people in our office have been discussing recently, we are increasingly seeing people waver away from Google on long tail industry specific searches and move to websites that are almost guaranteed to answer their query.

This means that businesses are now wanting to appear in new searches, not just Google, Yahoo and Bing. With this new trend developing it easy to see that it will become competitive however I am sceptical at how much some of these sites can actually have optimisation done for them. Many work on exact matching or showing the oldest/newest entries and you can’t actually do much about the way it brings results back.

Of course manipulating titles and putting the right “tags” will have positive effects but each site is it’s own ball game and it could become very hectic very fast.

There is also Googles reaction to consider. They are not going to let all those searches go without a fight and with there increased range of search projects (such as books, base, etc) will be challenging people for these customers.

Conclusion

SEO is going through a lot of changes at the moment, we can expect the next year to be a very interesting time for everyone in the search marketing industry but the practice is far from dead and is actually growing way beyond the “search engine” barrier to become just “search”.

We all know creating sitemaps is an essential part of any webmasters jobs these days but as time goes on they become more and more important. Aside from just supporting them Google made a series of changes last week (here’s their post) to give you even more reason to use them.

The most important update is that Google now support a much bigger sitemap than before, the previous 1,000 child limit has been raised to 50,000. That means size is no longer an excuse for not submitting!

A few smaller updates have rolled out including more accurate URL counting, additional support for XSD schemas and increased speed on sitemap processing. Hopefully this is going to be useful since I have genuinely waited days for Google to even notice my sitemap before.

Wondering how to create a sitemap on your site? Well it’s pretty easily actually you get some software to do it!

My recommended choice is the script available at XML-Sitemaps. It works well, is easy to install and well worth the low asking price. If you have a small site you don’t have to pay anything at all as they have a free tool for sites less than 500 pages.

Not hooked on web based apps? The GSiteCrawler is available for free and does a pretty good job of making sitemaps too.

Once you have followed the instructions for your chosen software all you need to do is upload the file and submit inside Google WMT/Yahoo/Bing and easy peasy all 3 major players have your sitemap ready to crawl. If you don’t already have them here are the places to submit sitemaps to;

• Yahoo
• Google
• Bing

Today I’m going to cover something that’s asked about a lot but is, in actual fact, quite easy to do. It’s the subject of redirects.

First things first though. What is a redirect and why would you want one?

Well “redirect” can refer to a few things but in this case we are referring to a server side redirect and specifically one controlled by htaccess on linux based servers.

Windows based server control redirects with IIS and while they can be easy too we will cover that in another tutorial.

A redirect is essentially a command that makes an end user or client go to somewhere other than the place they first requested, this can be for a huge range of reasons such as older pages, broken pages, site moves or more but essentially it lets you control a users behaviour.

Many designers redirect with the head command meta refresh however this is not SEO friendly, all the methods shown here will help users and spiders access your site.

The main reason people need to redirect is when they move something. If the page you move is indexed by a search engine (like Google) you should always redirect it. This is because Google will go looking for this page and if they get bounced to a 404 page, or worse a poorly done 404 page, then it could have negative implications for your site.

To check if the page you’re moving/removing is in the index use the search syntax site:www.mysite.com/movedpage.html. Putting that in Google/Yahoo/MSN will let you know if the page is there or not.

Controlling redirects on a Linux server is done by a file called .htaccess, note it does not have a name like “robots.txt” its just “.htaccess” this is called a dot file and can cause a problem for some OS’s but don’t worry you can call it what you want and rename it with your FTP client once it’s uploaded. The htaccess file should be placed in the root, alongside your index file. It can be placed elsewhere but it makes things a little more complex.

To make/edit a htaccess file use notepad or your OS’s equivalent, and simply open a new file, The first thing you will need to do is turn the redirect engine on, use the code;

##Rewrite Engine on code - MUST BE ACTIVE##
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

In this file “#” are for comments.

Next you need to determine the type of redirect you want; generally you will only use two types, 301 and 302. The choice is simple, a temporary redirect is a 302, search engines will follow it but not take much note, use it when a page is down for maintenance or a section being renewed.

A 301 redirect is permanent, search engines ten to follow them and replace the old index page with the new one and most importantly, transfer all the old important things such as links and page rank to the newer version.

OK so you have you old page, your new page and you know you want a 301 redirect, what next?

A simple line of code in the htaccess is all you need.

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.mysite.com/newpage.html

That’s all you need, simple! You just need to put a new line for each redirect and test them once you upload the file. Just change the number to 301 if you only want a temporary redirect.

You can do loads more with htaccess and I will be exploring some more of the options in future posts but here are a few more snippets of code to help you along.

Redirecting a Subdirectory

##Redirect a subdirectory to temporary page##
RedirectMatch 302 ^/articles(.*)$ http://www.example.com/temporary-page.php

Redirect an Entire Site (Be careful with this one!)
##Redirect My Whole Site##
Redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com

Redirect Whole Site to Maintenance Page
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/downtime\.html$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /downtime.html [R=307,L]