Really, what else can I say?

HAH. Bet THAT got your attention.

No, I'm not actually saying SEO is dying, or SEO is going away, or that SEOs are crooks. I'm an SEO. Some of my best friends are SEOs...

But the definition of SEO is changing. The latest YaBing news will probably accelerate that change. And when the dust settles, or at least starts drifting in a different direction, SEO will no longer be a standalone craft.

Instead, SEO will become about deriving value from search visits to a web site. And that will make SEO a full-on marketing discipline. Here's why:

Rankings are dying

Optimizing for a specific keyword and ranking is an even dumber strategy now than it was a year ago. With personalized search, behavior tracking and other fine things, the search engines are constantly tweaking and adjusting which sites go where.

Focus on the keyword rankings and you'll lose your mind, as well as your business.

What can SEOs focus on, then?

Traffic matters

Instead, watch your organic search traffic (traffic from unpaid search results). Is it going up? Great! Your SEO is working. Is it going down? Bummer. Your SEO hasn't kicked in yet.

So, SEOs aren't in the rankings business any more. We're in the traffic business.

But quality matters more

'More traffic' is not a business goal. So search traffic quality is more important than quantity.

'Quality' is determined by search traffic's direct contribution to the growth of the business. Nothing else matters.

SEOs aren't in the traffic business, either. We're in the business growth business. Ask any competent SEO and I'll bet they have at least one story of clients asking about bottom-line results rather than rankings. If someone's going to shell out cash for your services, they want to know the work's paying off, directly, for them.

Traffic will shrink

I've talked about the big shift from index to aggregator that most search engines are making.

That's going to reduce traffic. It won't reduce attention, though.

Clickability will rule

So, SEOs are going to be caught up in a battle not just for first-page real estate, but also for clicks. Our ability to craft search listings that grab attention, answer questions and make searchers click is as valuable as our ability to increase traffic.

And, our ability to get the right clicks (see 'quality', above) will become more important, because you can't write a different search snippet for every search query.

OK, you can, but I'll not talk about such black hattery here.

Conversion will rule

If you do a fantastic job of search engine optimization but the web site is a pile of steaming poop, you'll still end up fired.

No conversions = no quality
No quality = no benefit
No benefit = you're FIRED

SEOs must start learning about conversion optimization and usability. We have to be able to make query-focused recommendations that improve a page's conversion rate among searchers.

SEOs must become marketers

In short, SEOs have to become marketers. We have to learn to help companies derive real, bottom-line value from SEO. If we can't do that, I may someday write about the end of SEO and mean it.

I'm spending today trying not to spontaneously combust. Assuming I don't vanish with a puff of smoke and a FOOMP, this will be a quick primer on title tags.

In case you don't know: In web terms, the 'title tag' is a hidden bit of code on your page. It's typically visible to the public in two places.

First, in the title bar of your web browser:

And second, as the headline of most search snippets on search results pages:

As the headline of a search snippet, the title tag is the ultimate arbiter of clickability. A good title tag will get your search ranking clicked. A bad one will likely drive away potential visitors.

But the title tag is also the #1 onpage search ranking factor. More on that, after I do a quick HTML dissection (ew):

The Bones and Guts and Stuff

If you click 'View' and then 'Page Source' in Firefox, or View >> Source in Internet Explorer, you'll see what the title tag looks like when the skin's off the skeleton:

That's it - what all the fuss is about. See how the text matches the search snippet and title bar text, above?

Edit the stuff between '<title>' and '</title>' and you change what appears in the search engines, as well as the title bar.

Why You Should Care

Search engines rank pages, not web sites. At the top of the hierarchy that they use to do that ranking sits the title tag.

The title tag is the single most powerful ranking factor over which you have control. If you don't optimize your title tags, don't bother optimizing your site.

OK, that's a little extreme, but launching an SEO campaign without title tag optimization is a bit like launching a sailboat without sails. You're not going to get very far.

What You Should Do

Armed with this knowledge, you can now march down the hall to your web dude (or dudette) and request that:

1. The target phrase go first in the title tag. If I'm optimizing for "Buckets", then "Buckets: All shapes and colors at bucketorama" is good. "Bucketorama: All kinds of buckets" is bad.
2. By default, your shopping cart software put the product name first in all title tags, then the category name, then the brand.
3. Your content management system (CMS) and/or shopping cart software let you customize title tags product by product, as desired. The title tag must be independent of the page's visible headline:
   
4. Editing title tags on your site take less than 10 minutes per page (please lord).
5. There's a regular weekly time (minimum) scheduled for those edits.

That last item is really important: As your pages rise and fall in the rankings for different phrases, you'll likely want to tweak your titles a bit, adding and removing words for better clickability or rankings. Don't let someone tell you you can edit those tags 'just this once'.

That's it! Amazing how that one little tag can have such an impact...

Opinions Please

If this was too elementary, let me know and I won't write this kind of stuff. If it was helpful, let me know, too.

Related Posts

• Search Engines Are Structured Thinkers
• 10 SEO and Marketing-Friendly Title Tag Formulas
• Aggregation Aggravation, Part 3: Clickability

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'nuff said.

Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft (formerly MSN Live) has signed a ten year deal to power all Yahoo searches. The buzz is that this is a power play to try to even or over power the search engine playing field, which, as we all know is dominated by Google. It is a fact that Google gets over 70% of all searches online.

Data provided by Hitwise, February 2009

This merger will give Microsoft access to the Internet’s second-largest search engine audience and Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer stated in an interview,   “This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.”

Yahoo estimates an overall 500 million dollars in revenue as a result of this merger, as they will keep 88% of the money generated from all ads that run alongside search requests for the first five years of the deal, and it will save them over 275 million dollars in expenses to run its own search technology.

Reportedly Google tried to stop this merger by offering Yahoo a search advertising deal, but that was stopped when some U.S. antitrust officials threatened to sue.

Microsoft has big hopes for Bing and has launched a big campaign to promote their new SE in print, radio, online and TV ads.

Bing returns good results and has a lot of promise, and as of late some would argue better than those of Google’s for many search queries, since Google’s weird SERP changes that have been going on since late May.

The Merger and Internet Marketing

As an Internet marketer I welcome a more even playing field in the search engine market, because the Google monopoly is a big thorn in our sides. We all worry so much about Google and they can literally make or break our online businesses with just some SERP changes.

It would be nice to even out the competition and get more even traffic numbers across the board. Many of my sites rank in Bing and Yahoo, and it’s a shame that so little traffic comes via those sources.

Time will tell, with Google being as dominant as they it will not be an easy feat! Plus the fact that this deal is not expected to close until early next year, and then it maybe be another two years before all the pieces of the partnership are in place with antitrust regulators needing time to review the merger’s effects on the Internet ad market and of course to stitch the technologies together.

Read the full story on the Yahoo and Bing Merger Deal at Yahoo News

What do you guys think?

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