Preparing for Change: Future Proofing Your SEO
Feb 27th, 2008 by msdanielle
A few months ago, I linked to a presentation given by Wil Reynolds of ThinkSeer at Affiliate Summit London. I was glad to catch the latter part of his presentation “How to Futureproof Your SEO Efforts” at ASW, but missed the beginning because of all the activity in the expo hall. D’oh! What I was able to catch, I was glad to know, acknowledged many of the principles I understand about SEO. Here are some notes I jotted down for you. These are sort of in “minutes” format, and my interpretation of and thoughts on Wil’s presentation. Feel free to contact him at his blog if you have questions about the presentation — he’s a really cool guy!
Do what you have to do to rank now.
An over-arching sentiment was that while in the process of “futureproofing” your SEO strategy, ensure that you are competing for rankings now in congruence with ramping up your long-term strategy. This may include strategies that aim for short-term boosts in rankings (i.e. buying links), but keep in mind that over time these strategies can stop working. Ensure you’re building quality content and thinking about the future long-term health of your site. While SEO theorists will argue that buying links are a no-no (to Google), idly sitting on your hands while your competitors are knowingly buying links and outranking you is not in the best interest of your site.
On a side note, Jason Calacanis interjected with the question, “So if everyone else isn’t paying their taxes, you’d tell your clients not to pay their taxes?” Wil quickly replied, “I don’t know about tax accounting, but what I do know is SEO.” 
On a side side note, if you’re unaware, there’s been an air of tension surrounding Calacanis’ keynote speech which you can read about here and here. I encourage you to read about it.
Link diversity: gain a wide range of link sources.
There are many types of links you can get to your site, but PR links (public relations) are better than link bait links. I associate this sentiment with Michael Martinez’s claim that there are different benefits that incoming links contribute — one is passing anchor text, another is passing traffic, among others. By diversifying your link building and gaining PR links, this will help spread buzz about your site, in turn gaining you even more links from other real sources. Hence, the more PR your site gets, the less dependent you are on the short-term boost of purchased links.
The keyword tag is useless.
Focus on creating a good title attribute and meta description which will give an accurate description to actual users who are performing searches. The keyword tag has less influence on search engines than they did in the past. Don’t spend an exorbitant amount of time on your tags. They should just make sense to the user.
If it’s easy to catch, it’s easy to penalize.
Do not use link brokers, link exchange networks, linking “services,” or any automated system for gaining incoming links. If Google can catch it, they have the opportunity to penalize those who are involved through algorithm updates.
Don’t chase Google.
Google does what is ultimately in the best interest of their shareholders. Keep an eye on what they are doing to stay on top of changes. Look at the categories in the Google co-op so that you can be prepared for these changes.
Build asset inventory.
Include videos in your site and optimize them accordingly. “How-to” videos do well in Google. I agree with this point because I still get traffic from keywords relating to “how to swing a golf club.” How ironic is that?
Consult your clients on what’s good now, while guiding them for the future.
Tell your clients how to use Google to their advantage, but keep in mind that changes can occur at any time and be prepared to change as soon as these changes happen.
Give away free content.
Free quality content is great link bait. Hoarding content will not help get it into the right hands. One goal is to get your content to reach as many people as possible. You’ll get some great links for it — for free!
Fear MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask.
While Google doesn’t publish its own unique content, and neither do the other search engines, it doesn’t mean they never will. Anything can change at any time and one possibility is that they may one day add their own published content. Wouldn’t that suck…
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[Wil's presentation slides will be posted online soon.]
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I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again . . . it’s nice to hear from like-minded people at conferences like this . . . confirms and inspires
I’m quite surprise with your post. are you sure i cannot use link exchange?Google don’t allow it to be used to improve traffic to site?
he emphasized not using systematic link exchange programs or sites that only do link exchanges. buying links discreetly can in many cases not be detected by an algorithm. remember, the easier it is to get links, the easier it is to catch.
[...] Danielle raises an interesting point about building Public Relations links. She writes that “by diversifying your link building and gaining [Public Relations] links, [...]
Hey Danielle, great to meet you. I hope to see you in boston as well and catch a brewski or something.
What topics would you like to see me cover next time?
great to meet you as well. i hope i interpreted your presentation correctly, i wish i caught it from the beginning. i did appreciate you recommending the tools and directory list since we depend so much on the tools that we have at our disposal.
i would like to see arguments for why Google does not return the most relevant results. and what search engines could do to produce the most relevant results. i think it could be a great panel discussion, or even a debate. michael martinez also talks about it too and just like how people say “don’t believe everything you see on tv is real,” you can also say “don’t believe everything you find on page 1 Google is relevant.”
[...] and grabbed a seat at their table. I had missed Wil’s SEO session the previous day, here is a recap by Ms Danielle and a video clip, and wanted to meet him in person. Having gone through Amit’s Super Affiliate [...]