Are you looking to leap to the top of the heap of the Search engines? And you want to stay there? Well if that is the case then you need to do some forward thinking, the trick to staying at the top of the search engines is to have a good grasp of where they are going not where they are.
Yes its true that you are going to have to play catch-up to get to where your competition is, and they are going to try to stay a step ahead of you by continueing to try to get ahead as well.
According to Steven Bradley in his article “SEO Success”
“It’s natural for those new to seo to see optimization in terms of formulas. It’s where things once were and it’s easy to find articles online about how to write meta tags and about ideal keyword density. Unfortunately the world of search moves very fast and these articles, even just a few years old, are long out of date. It’s possible that articles written today will often be less than effective by the time the tactic would be expected to pay off. By the time you’re reading about it, it’s probably already been in place for several months and may already be something the search engines are working to keep from being effective.
If you want your pages and site to rank well next year you need to think where the search engines are headed and not where they’ve been. It’s true that no one really knows where search engines are going. No one can even say with 100% certainty why a certain page ranks today. But we can, by looking at a collection of pages that rank well and by observing what happens when we make changes to our own pages, what likely works. The more we see what works today and what from yesterday has stopped working, the more patterns begin to emerge where things may be headed in the future.”
One way to do this maybe to look into the patents filed by the search engines. While they are not a crystal ball by any means they give a definite idea on what the powers that be want to do in the future.
The articles that are making the rounds today in the SEO world, comfirm what we are reading in the patents office as well. That being that all of the major players are looking to make searches more personalized in the future. The search engines will be placing more emphasis on personal search, user traffic patterns, and social communities, with less of an emphasis on the keywords of today.
No one can really say with certainty where search engines are moving, but by staying current you can get a better understanding of where they might be moving. My favorite sources of current information are forums and blogs. Both by their nature are updated frequently. But it’s important not to accept everything within either as fact.
