The future of search engine marketing

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What does the future hold for search engine marketing? Obviously, unless we’re time travellers, we can’t know, but we can make guesses. I think a look at the new Yahoo home page gives you some idea. Yahoo has a search bar, but they also have a number of other options which keep you right in their web empire. And I can’t imagine they’ll be the only ones to do something like this. If this trend becomes the norm, you’ll see less and less people being re-directed from the portals to remote pages.

This means that webmasters who aren’t building social contacts will end up dead. The web has always been a network of people and computers, but “who you know” looms larger every day as a key predictor of whether you’ll succeed online or not. That, or a whole lot of talent. If you can build something unique and worthwhile, the public may just discover you, but you can’t expect it or count on it.

Part of the problem is the “spam fighting” being waged by the search engine companies. Everytime they design a solution to the problem of spammers, the spammers upgrade their efforts and keep on going. They adapt, because that’s their whole job. Inadvertenly, many blameless webmasters get caught up in the increasingly Draconian measures. The spam wars aren’t being won by the search engines, but much like the drug war, are now increasingly creating resistance because of all the collateral damage.

My advice for dealing with search engines is to never get too emotionally involved. Have a “romp in the hay” with them, collect as much money as you can, but DO NOT seriously attempt to use them exclusively to make money unless you can SCALE and SCALE FAST. If you can make enough money in one week to retire, then do it. But if your plan takes a year or more, you might be let down by the results as algos change.

It all depends on how agile you can be, because the internet marketing game keeps evolving all the time. Right now I’m much more impressed with my viral efforts than SEM efforts in the last few months. Websites like StumbleUpon drive vast amounts of traffic here. I never heard of StumbleUpon until I saw it in the logs, but I’ve received over 1,100 unique visitors from them this week. That’s what I’m talking about!

If the search engines don’t want to “play ball”, then maybe they’ll be “looking for a new team” soon enough. In the meantime, we all have to make our goal to have 15-20 great referrers to our websites, and not just one or two.

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