Question 5: The US economy is in recession and it may not manage to revert until the end of this year. Do you consider Search Engine Marketing a recession-proof industry or can SEO be easily skipped on companies’ marketing budgets?

Scott Buresh

As companies are re-evaluating budgets, they are looking at alternate ways to get more marketing or advertising for less cost, and more consumers are considering SEO as an option due to its considerably lower price when compared to traditional advertising strategies. For us, business is not slowing because companies are beginning to understand that optimization can help them bring business right to their door – just in a different way.

Matt Foster

The fact of the matter is that SEO will deliver a greater ROI than any other form of advertising. Therefore, organizations faced with budgetary crunches during an economic slowdown should eliminate all other forms of marketing before eliminating an SEO campaign. Unfortunately, many organizations do believe that SEO is somewhat of a luxury item, and as a result the search marketing industry is affected by an economic slowdown. Again, this is the result of a misperception on the part of organizations that SEO is a luxury item. Through education of the client or prospective client, and clear and understandable regular reporting to the client as to search rankings, traffic, ROI, and the like, the elimination of SEO campaigns can be avoided. The key to success, during times of economic downturn or otherwise, is to be able to justify the expenditure through solid reporting and accountability procedures.

Roger Janik

I am not an economist, but I think that there is a great enough need and many, many businesses realize that SEO and an online presence is mandatory in today’s business world. Ten years ago, I would say that a possible long, drawn out recession as we may possibly be experiencing in the next couple of years could have had a huge impact on the amount of businesses that create an online presence and put a large budget towards growing it. However today, since it has become a necessity, most businesses will not blink an eye at making sure their presences is sufficient. While many businesses might cut some of the extra features or limit the bells and whistles, for the most part, I don’t see a huge dent in SEO budgets and campaigns if the economy goes into a mild to moderate recession.

Frank Siano

SEO is not recession-proof at all. Against other forms of traditional marketing such as offline marketing, it is much less vulnerable but is still not fully recession-proof. In bad economic times, everyone cuts their budgets so marketing budgets as a whole get trimmed.

Question 6: Things change rapidly in the search engine arena – what do you expect to emerge next?

Scott Buresh

The current emphasis is on the monetization of social networking sites. Feedback is evaluated and pushback is occurring. Companies are increasingly making decisions to come up with what is and is not acceptable. Additionally, there is a consolidation in the search industry – while Google was once the underdog per se, they now are at the top, proving themselves otherwise. Perhaps we’ll see the emergence of a hipper, savvier site or service to grab a piece of the market share.

Matt Foster

In the short term we expect blended results (universal search) to be the most important factor in search marketing. Companies producing good content such as video and other rich media, combined with effective social media optimization, stand to fare well in the changing world of search. As personalized search and geotargeting continue to rise in importance, the focus of the industry, and the metric by which any search marketing campaign should be judged, will likely change from the simple practice of tracking search rankings to more useful metrics like traffic, sales, and ROI. It is important that SEO firms who wish to be leaders in their industry establish reporting procedures which take into account factors other than simple search. Analytics experts, usability experts, and the like are likely to find increasingly lucrative career opportunities in the field. Of course, the power of social media and cloud computing cannot be ignored, either.

Roger Janik

• SEO Standards

There is a push taking place trying to make all SEO consultants and agencies to follow a set amount of guidelines in order to raise the integrity of the industry. However, the idea of SEO standards has been met with considerable dissent. Here is an argument for SEO standards: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/03/
seo_standards.html
Here is an argument against SEO standards: http://searchengineland.com/080327-080020.php

• DAO

(Digital Asset Optimization) The idea that a comprehensive strategy is required to enhance rankings and web site visibility of searches in all types of media. For instance, using traditional text, blogs, videos, audio (e.g. interviews, radio show,) press releases, images, etc.

• SEO to Continue to Grow Around the World and within Many Languages

While English once was the most popular language on the internet, today there is enough content in most languages for many to stick with sites in their native tongue. However, many sites can find opportunities in this trend. For instance, optimizing for a specific search engine (for instance Seznam.cz the Czech search engine) as well creating specific content in a foreign language. It should be noted that this trend will not be relevant to most local and regional businesses.

• Continue Deterioration of Paid Links & Reciprocal Links
Paid links will probably continue to decline forcing many businesses to start being creative in generating links. Since generating links and content creation usually go hand in hand, you should see more content being developed.

• Universal Search and Personalization as discussed above

• Optimizing Blog or Sites for Specific Engines (mostly for publishers looking to increase their CTR click through rate)
Web developers that create websites and content for publishing (to profit off of AdSense or YPN) will continue to become more specialized regarding optimization for the search engines that bring in the most revenue. For instance, for publishers that use Google Adsense, focus will presumably go to optimizing for Google, however a website that sells ads for YPN will continue to move toward specifically optimizing for the Yahoo search engine.

• Continuing Growth of Social Sites such as bookmarking, news sites and Facebook, MySpace, etc
Again, social sites will continue to play a big role on the web. Whether you utilize Digg, MySpace, Yahoo Answers, Squidoo or other sites to help build links and increase visibility these sites have proven their worth as being a great way to generate traffic, build rankings and create brands.

• Optimization for Mobile PC’s and phones
Obviously, Google has something up its sleeve looking to acquire bandwidth earlier this year and developing Android (open handset alliance) and as far as I could tell more and more people are using web applications with their mobile phones, smart phones and ultra portable computers. While it’s still a little too early to tell what exactly will be important in regards to optimization with this new technology, it does seem likely that content delivered to mobile devices along with advertisements will be a major revenue generator for the big search engines.

Frank Siano

There is never any saying what will be next, but there are always things to follow to see what will be that next trend. Current trends of social network related efforts are changing the game every day right now, so that is something to keep up on and follow closely.

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Stay tuned for the next roundtable feature.

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