OneSearch

Bruce Clay, the president of Bruce Clay, Inc. was recently at PubCon in Las Vegas where he spoke at a session entitled “Top-Shelf Organic SEO.” In this session, he discussed the future of SEO as search engines evolve into more modern ranking methods through more personalized search results.

Bruce Clay claimed that “ranking is dead” because different people who search for the same term will end up with different search results based on their prior search history.

His specific example was three different people searching for “java.” One person may be looking for programming, one is looking for coffee, and one is looking for travel information. In theory, personal search will know that and provide results accordingly.

“We can’t search for any term and look at rankings because I can get different results than you for exactly the same query. So that’s going to change a lot,” he says. It doesn’t matter if you’re logged into Google or not. Bruce believes that Google personalized results will be coming out within the first quarter of next year.

Bruce Clay states that going forward from now on, SEOs are going to have to looking at measuring traffic, bounce rates, actions, and will have to look at analytics. Questions that need to be asked are:

- Did I get the conversion I was after?

- Did I really deliver on the promise of SEO?

He thinks that in the first six months of 2009, we will see a lot more that traffic is all that really matters and ranking is dead.
Bruce says, “If you’re not ready for it as an SEO, you’re gonna lose.”

The next day, Matt Cutts of Google responsed to Bruce Clay’s assertions.
Matt does not completely agree with Bruce that “ranking is dead” but he does say that he doesn’t think it is as important as it once was.

Cutts said, “I’m not sure I would say ranking is dead but it’s not as important as it used to be. The fact is the smart SEOs are not just necessarily looking at the rankings. They are looking at conversion, they are looking at their server log. It’s great if you’re ranking for a phrase but unless that leads to sales that doesn’t help you very much.”

“The challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, pay attention to traffic, pay attention to conversions and keep building good content and don’t worry about ‘can I show people that I rank number one for my trophy phrase.’”

“Universal is really useful and I think it will continue to expand and what that means in 2009 you can’t just think of yourself as an SEO,” said Cutts.

“SEOs are starting to embrace the fact that they are marketers. It’s a broader spectrum. You have to think about how you build buzz, how do you get loyal customers, how do you optimize your ROI. All those different things and that can include how do I make good videos, do I have a book, things like that.”

“Black Hat SEO is getting a little more malicious. In a world where Black Hat is moving towards really illegal things as an SEO you have to decide your risk tolerance and do I really want to try to compete with people who are doing illegal stuff or do I want to make a long term site that’s gonna stand the test of time.”

2009 should be an interesting year.