While Gord has been on vacation in Hawaii, I've been keeping up with his blog posts on personalized search. If you haven't checked it out yet, be sure to read his most recent post on Personalized Search Brouhaha. His initial post The Personalized Results are Coming, The Personalized Results are Coming! seemed to elicit quite a response. Personalized search is becoming a hot topic and it's bound to get even hotter as we see the engines experiement with methods for improving search results.
Gord's initial post mentions that there are two major implications to personlaized search... what it means for search marketers, especially organic optimizers, and what it means to users. A large part of my job is helping my clients with strategies for optimizing their sites for the search engines. The impact of personalized search is going to have a dramatic effect on some of the basic SEO practices that organic search engine marketers employ. I'm not shaking in my boots though. I think that personalized search is great. To me it means more relevant results. For my clients it means that they better provide relevant content for the user. If they are going to be an authority on a topic, they better be able to back it up. For our B2B clients this means that they need to believe in their solutions and ensure that their websites contain the proper messaging to communicate their authoritativeness. The onsite experience is just as important (actually more important) than simply driving traffic from the search engines to the site. Just a little secret for some of you SEO's out there. It's all about the user. The sooner you learn this the easier your life will become.
As Gord mentioned, the days of the universal results page are numbered. Which means that the days of the reverse engineering approach to SEO are equally numbered. Things are starting to heat up. Frankly I cannot wait. Search is getting personal.
Labels: Gord Hotchkiss, personalized search
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