As bloggers, most of us have invested thousands of hours online in an attempt to ensure our success at blogging. We write interesting posts, interact with other bloggers worldwide, we read, study and some spend most of their time optimizing their sites for search friendliness and better search engine rankings. So the question comes to my mind: Are we spending too much time working on and talking about SEO when it may not exist in the next few years?
With the rate at which technology changes, I can’t help but wonder if SEO will be the same 5 years from now as it is today. Google continuously changes its search and ranking algorithms to better suit the end user and in the process knocks out thousands of sites from previously obtained rankings. Since the general idea is that; better search rankings = hundreds more visitors, webmasters must always be on the look-out for changes in the game and study how they can please google – Everybody is trying to please google, I do too, but what about other search engines and other methods of optimization? How about Community Optimization?
Other Methods of Increasing Traffic
Many successful blogs are receiving most of their traffic from referring sites. This is achieved by the communities that they have built by commenting on other sites and adding value to the niche as a whole. In this scenario it is more likely that someone will click on your link back to your site. For example, although my blog is new, 66% of all my site’s visitors are from referring sites and only about 10% from search engines. This is the case with many other bloggers, especially the very established blogs.
So, what should we be focusing on? Pleasing the search engines, or building and pleasing the blogging community.
Ok, so maybe SEO won’t completely disappear, but I think more thought should go into what best suits a particular website in its niche. A blog will not perform to its full potential unless it has an interactive community following it and yet a business website that sells computer parts may receive better results through search engines. It all depends on the type of site, its goals and niche.
Focus More on Building Relationships & Communities
Optimizing solely for getting better rankings in search engines means sitting and waiting for quality traffic to hit your website. Great SEO rankings are oftentimes difficult to obtain, especially if your blog is new. I’m now hearing that google also uses the age of your registered domain to calculate rankings and site trustworthiness; I’m not sure if this is true but its very much possible.
Instead of sitting and waiting, kick start your blog’s success and engage the blogging community. You can get great results by:
- Commenting on other blogs within your chosen niche. Do not use spamming methods, your comments will be deleted
- Engage in Discussions with other commentators; you will get noticed and other bloggers will visit your site
- When other bloggers visit your site and start commenting Always Reply with a thank you and a thought
- Always try to Add Value to other blogs through commenting. Don’t just leave a “Great post” comment, try to engage in discussion by expressing your point of view or share new ideas
- Seek opportunities to Guest Post on other blogs. This can be a massive way to promote your blog especially on sites that receive lots of traffic
- Ask other experienced bloggers to critique your site. You may think your blog is the ‘bomb’ until an expert opens your eyes to new ideas
I can guarantee that by practicing these few simple steps you will begin to see increases in your daily traffic and from new sources.
Should We Still ‘Please’ Google & Other Search Engines?
Most definitely, we should try to please them or better yet please ourselves by paying attention to their guidelines and optimizing our content in a manner that is search engine friendly and keyword rich. This should not be done, however, at the expense of reader experience. Great content = Rich reader experience = More readers = Successful blog.
Although community building is best suited for a blog’s growth, we cannot completely ignore search engine optimization, since it does send us a fair (Not massive) amount of traffic. So no door should be closed. By trying to see through a search engine’s eyes though, I can’t see how SEO will not be a part of the future.
I think that while we definitely should have our main focus on people and networking, we cannot push aside the need for search engine traffi. These are the people that could possibly be our new subscribers!
I think that SEO will always have importance, but how much importance, that is hard to say. But it is not going to stop me doing SEO on each post I make.
.-= Tom | Build That List´s last blog ..Finding the Perfect Temperature For Your Mailing List =-.
Hey Tom, thanks for commenting.
I definitely won’t stop doing SEO on my sites but I see so many bloggers out there focusing too much of their time on mastering SEO and completely forget about other core techniques for attracting and increasing traffic.
I think I will begin to teach on how to maintain the right balance and what percentage of a blogger’s time should be spent on SEO vs. other practices.
I think the SEO will be completely different 5 years from now. Just think of all of the things webmasters have to do to get amble traffic to their sites. Just within the last 5 years we’ve had all these social networking sites come about.
People are already talking about web 3.0. I think it is going to be pretty fascinating to see what is going to happen and what we webmasters will need to do to get and sustain traffic in the future.
.-= Jamiah´s last blog ..7 ways to drive traffic to your website =-.
Hey Jay,
Thanks for reading. I think the changes in the next 5 years will be massive, I can’t wait to see all the new developments. 5 years ago, things were very different on the web, just imagine the next few years.
What major changes do you expect to see in the years to come, especially with the web 3.0 idea?
I can’t even fathom what the web will be like in the next 5 years. I am sure that there is going to be some new phenomenon site like YouTube where we can broaden our horizons.
I am not sure if it is going to be harder for webmasters coming up in the future or easier. It is a very tough call.
The web has changed dramatically over the last couple of years so its going to be interesting to see what happens next.
first of all thanks for this great article sam and secondly I hate SEO, and i don’t even optimize my site 1%. i don’t gonna waste my time for a robot.
Though 90% of my traffic comes from referring sites & social networking sites.
.-= Dev | Technshare´s last blog ..SEO – Your Basic Fundamentals =-.
Thanks for commenting Dev.
Wow, 90%, that shows how much time you spend on developing your community. Good job.
Basic SEO would be good though to help more search engine users to find a useful blog such as yours.
Keep up the good work.
Dev | Technshare Isn’t it bad that lots of your visitors come from other sites where you comment and so on? Isn’t it a lot better to have visitors find you through google on their own? It leaves you more time to focus on your own website instead of others their websites, or so I think. I may be wrong on that though.
.-= Experimently´s last blog ..5 games for the entrepreneur and investor =-.
Thanks for reading Experimently.
I would not say that its bad that most visitors come from other sites commented on. Blogging is a community based practice rather than just an individual doing his own thing. So through interaction, bloggers and others can share and find valuable information that is useful to the entire community.
The time spent on SEO and community building should be done in the right proportion. For me most of my time is spent building the community which has brought me my most valuable commentators and frequent readers.
So, community building is a more proactive approach to building a blog and readership rather than sitting and waiting for searchers.
Give it a try and observe the results.
.-= Sam´s last blog ..10 Simple Steps to Secure & Protect your WordPress Blog =-.
A little bit of Seo doesn’t hurt much…at least it is better than paying for google adwords…i hope you can get what i am talking about…
.-= SeoWiz Kid´s last blog ..Search Engine Marketing by Social Search =-.
I agree Wiz Kid.
A little SEO is good and with direction, it can produce very specific results.
Google Adwords can be extremely expensive and run into thousands of dollars and the results are not all that great. Adwords is definitely not for the average blogger or site owner
Interesting topic. Well I think that in the next 5 years we will still be using SEO. Not sure when or why SEO will not be necessary.
.-= Kharim´s last blog ..How Often Should You Post A Blog? =-.
Hey Kharim,
Thanks for reading. I think the web is going to go through many changes over the next year even; and the way search engines treat keywords and other optimizing data constantly changes.
Who knows what will happen; I know google will definitely bring some changes.
There are many ways to increase traffic to a site. SEO is one way, building relationships is another way. Someone that wants to learn how to build regular traffic has to learn how to utilize both ways. So that if one goes, the other is there to compensate.
.-= Women’s Clothing´s last blog ..H&M Clothing: H and M Clothing store =-.
Thank you for taking the time to comment.
I agree. The right balance should always be maintained and it especially depends on your niche and the type of visitors you’re trying to attract. Right now for my blog, SEO is complementary and is not my main focus.
.-= Sam´s last blog ..Is Your Blog User-Friendly? Avoid Deadly Mistakes Many Bloggers Make =-.
Google seems to be doing its best to integrate social media platforms (like twitter) into their results. This indicates a growing trend toward rankings being calculated by communities and followers versus SEO. However, I do think SEO will still play a role in our lives in 5 years. It will be interesting to watch it all play out!
.-= Keller Hawthorne´s last blog ..How to Use Testimonials to Drastically Improve Your Blog’s Success =-.
Hey Keller,
I’m definitely watching closely to see the changes that search engines will integrate because of social media. I do think SEO will be here for the long haul but its general standards will surely evolve to provide a much better user experience as internet usage trends change.
There still exists the challenge, however, of sifting through community conversations to find the results that are truly valid. This is a problem I’ve had.
.-= Sam´s last blog ..6 Awesome WordPress Alternatives =-.
I do think that SEO will be still important for next 5 yrs. Because, I don’t think search engines like Google would easily change their main algorithm which gives high weightage to on-site optimizatios and number of backlinks for ranking any page.
One question sometimes arises in my mind that suppose if search engines like Google completely go real time for key phrases then it will be interesting to see how people perform seo and how search engines will rank them.
The future is quite interesting when you think more.
.-= Typhoon´s last blog ..Three Simple But Useful FireFox Hacks For Google Analytics =-.
Hey Typhoon. Thanks for visiting!
SERP rankings based on real-time keyword phrase changes would make search a lot more competitive and require an even closer watch on a site’s ranking and status. It would also require a huge amount of additional resources on google’s part to offer something like that. It would really be interesting to see that. I guess that’s the ultimate goal though; real-time results is definitely the future.
SEO will definitely be here to stay. The only factors that will change are the sources and exercises that determine search results, for example, social media. Let’s watch closely to see what will happen!
.-= Sam´s last blog ..6 Awesome WordPress Alternatives =-.
Hey Sam! This topic is so hot right now; I think people are generally frustrated with SEO and that’s why (thankfully) the focus is being taken away from it.
To me, SEO is a science and it can be mastered and turned into a system. If bloggers can figure out the best SEO system for their blog, they can then spend the bulk of their promotion time on all of the other (better) forms of traffic.
Thanks for this post.
Cheers,
Tia
.-= Tia – BizChickBlogs.com´s last blog ..8 Minute Post – Becoming Un-boring =-.
Hey Tia,
I don’t think the relevance of SEO will ever disappear. The good thing is that basic SEO exercises are now becoming much easier to expedite and the art is slowly being demystified. Social media is presenting some amazing opportunities for taking advantage of search results and going viral with our blogs.
Thanks for being a returning visitor
.-= Sam´s last blog ..How To Use Social Media To Effectively Improve SEO =-.
Hi Robyn, community optimization sound pretty interesting to me. Assuming you can get a community with enough data and information to provide quality search results it might just work. But I think it would take many years for anyone to successfully accomplish this.
Even blog engage for example. We have tons of articles in our database now but it still wouldn’t be even close enough to provide good quality search results on any given topic. Perhaps the future brings some interesting turn of events regarding SEO but for now it’s not looking any different to me.
I look forward to seeing what chance take affect if any at all.
.-= bbrian017´s last blog ..Take a moment and introduce yourself to our community =-.
Thanks for commenting Brian.
Community optimization, in my mind, really involves blog community building through social activities that influence search results as well as positioning blog owners to easily go viral in a more massive way than what SEO could do on its own.
I also think that in the very near future a site like blog engage will provide some excellent results for search as the community grows.
I’m really anticipating a bright future for blog engage. All the best!
.-= Sam´s last blog ..How To Use Social Media To Effectively Improve SEO =-.
I really think we’re almost coming full circle in terms of the web community. Remember web rings back in the 90s? I think we’re getting back to something such as that in terms of connections between websites but then we’ll use social media and networking to search the larger network.
Google and other search engines are trying to keep up with social search but with so much word-of-mouth dialog for finding sites, it’s going to be tough to compete.
.-= Murlu´s last blog ..Time Management For Successful Bloggers =-.
Hey Murlu,
The search engines will be playing more of a complementary role to social sites. I don’t think they will completely die since the need for regular search will definitely live on. I agree, social media is similar to web rings, only with a high tech modern day twist