Thursday, March 5, 2009

Automatic SEO


You heard it here first.

Within 3 years, almost anyone will be able to perform search engine optimization (seo) to their site.

It will all be done through a back-end content management system (CMS) - and it will be easy and fast working.

But, it doesn't mean it't the end of the world for Optimization services.

While a properly optimizd site is nice to have, if no one finds it, that won't matter. Expect to see more companies offer Search Engine Marketing as the premiere service, as that is more time intense anyways.

How can this be? Let's take a trip back to 1995.

You remember: blinking text, huge jpeg graphics, dial-up and AOL was all the rage. Back then, it was believed that all you needed was a website, and you could become an Internet millionaire. While that was true for a few lucky people, for the rest of us it was still the same old grind. But the, the emergence of template editors arrived. MicroSoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and others appeared making the creation of a website fairly easy.

Once the online world realized they could create their own sites, they next wanted the ability to edit their sites. Thus, the birth of CMS became a reality and many web design shops found themselves scrambling to offer thses back-end modules or services to their clients.

Today, people expect to have a website that they can edit, which brings us to SEO. There are many properties within a site that can be generated with a CMS system. For example:
  • Meta Tags
  • Page Titles
  • Page Names
  • Site Maps
  • CSS Stylization
If the web administrator knows the simple basics of seo, they can easily apply those values to all the pages any CMS system creates.

I know this is coming because I've built these exact systems for clients. Once a client learns the importance of proper naming stuctures, and the best way to naturally place their keyphrases into all parts of their website, they are already two steps ahead of their competition.

Search Engine Optimization is still a valuable way to earn money, but as more people integrate the Internet with their lives, they will become knowlegeable enough to perform those tasks on their own.

The next step will be the automation of SEM, which I still think is only about 5 years away...

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