If you want flashy, Madison Avenue-like designs then please look elsewhere.  We get stuff done quickly and effectively with very little bells and whistles.  Our clients believe that presenting information to end-users in a clean and effective manner is the ONLY way to market your products and services online.

Search is changing the way we think about the web.  It’s also changing how we perceive the organic results that we see today.  In the not-so-distant future, SEO will cease to exist, at least it won’t exist as we know it today.

The fundamentals of how search engines like Google display search results are shifting.  With the creation of Universal Search last year, Google opened up Pandora’s Box in the search world.  Prior to then, everything was fairly predictable.  You execute a search, the results show up from top to bottom in order of the most relevant web sites.  With Universal Search, Google began to incorporate Video results, Product results, Book results, News results, and Social Media results, to name a few.  This action paved the way for what we believe will be the next phase in search engine evolution: Personal results.

You are already beginning to see this on search engines like Amazon.com’s A9 and within Google itself if you are logged into your Google Account when you execute your search.  Today, you’ll occasionally see Local search come into play when Google knows where you are located.  But let’s take that to the next level.  Personal results will take everything that a search engine knows about you (not just your location) and tweak the algorithm ever so slightly so that items/pages are very specifically relevant to you and you only. This means that when you execute a search for “holiday gifts”, you will get a list of items/pages that are very uniquely suited to you and only you. Everyone else, however, will get an entirely different result set.

Now think about that from the standpoint of a company like G4 Commerce.  We optimize web sites for a living.  Our clients pay us to get them to the front page of Google for their important keywords.  How will we possibly do that for each of the millions of users of Google each day?  It’s a good thing we are multi-talented

After search engine optimizing web sites for countless numbers of clients over the past 7 years, we’ve noticed that much has changed…and much has stayed the same.

What’s Changed?

• New niche search engines pop-up regularly.
• Microsoft now favors changing it’s search engine name at least two or three times a year.
• Google et al. are incorporating many different forms of media in “Universal” search results giving us much more to peruse than just a simple web page.
• Social Media is playing a much larger role in the relevancy of a web page than ever before.
• Yahoo is giving up the search war to Google and Microsoft in favor of a strong focus on digital advertising.
• “Paris Hilton” is no longer the number 1 requested keyword search each month (thank you!).

What’s Stayed the Same?

• Microsoft still hasn’t figured out that it cannot build a search engine that people will use with regularity. Not just because their technology is inferior to Google’s, it’s actually not that bad, but because a majority of online searchers don’t like or trust Microsoft’s brand image. Searching is a very personal experience.  Every day we pour the questions that are on our mind into a little tiny box on a screen and divulge our inner curiosities. This information, in the wrong hands, can be damaging and no matter what they call their search engine (MSN, Live, Bing), people still will not trust them.
• Tried and true search engine optimization tactics are still the safest and most effective way to increase search engine rankings over time.  Let’s extrapolate on this topic.

Tried and True

The SEO tactics that are working well in today’s awkwardly changing search environment are the same techniques that worked 5 years ago.  Fundamentals like proper TITLE tags, H1 tags, lots of inbound links, well-formed HTML and good page content still heavily out-weigh the tricks and traps that you can find when you search for seedy topics like “SEO tricks” or “SEO secrets” on Google.  Sure there are little nuances and small tweaks that need to be made regularly to keep companies like us on our toes, but the fundamentals still hold true and can get an un-optimized site huge gains in very little time.  So why are there so many bad SEO companies out there if these techniques haven’t changed all that much?  Let me know what you think.