SEO Missed Opportunities for the Future
As I write this blog you can be sure that Santa is getting ready to fill his sack full of presents and perform the greatest one day delivery of all time, unlike the postal service. That`s right, the bearded, red-suited wizard doesn`t let a bit of snow interrupt parcel deliveries on the 25th December(remember kids he comes after midnight!).
As we have looked back over the year we have seen many blogs and tips on how best to build, internally optimise and link websites and this got me thinking on the areas that perhaps we overlook or discount of being of importance to Google. There are of course set elements we try and adhere to in general such as building strong quality links, ensuring the content on the website is relevant and that the keywords chosen are suitable for the site, including having a high enough search volume (after all, there is no point in optimising for a keyword noone searches for).
It`s good to have rules and standards and by sticking to them you can gain a level of consistency across your client websites and eventually it should result in good performance and a high listing. However, some areas of interest for Google could potentially be being missed when it looks at your site.
Alternative methods to consider
Social media can be a big part of SEO campaigns nowadays and Twitter and Facebook accounts are used frequently by business owners and customers alike. Depending on the keyword, there is a potential for information within a Facebook profile to be utilised and looked at by Google thanks to the users profile information (and currently only the profile information) available to Google to crawl. This would be hugely beneficial to any company wanting to make the most of their website and Facebook page, which would gain interest and allow another link to the site.
There is also a consideration on no-follow links that are usually made as such because you want the link juice to remain on the site, however, by making them follow on the other hand this would allow Google to see these links and determine that because of the high quality nature of them that the site deserves a higher listing. This could be a missed opportunity on sites where there are many high quality links which are simply being missed because of the no-follow rule.
Another potential opportunity could be the likes of Gmail. None of us like to think that our emails are being read by outside sources but Google`s reach is becoming larger and larger and perhaps references to sites and links within emails could be crawled by Google. Lets not forget that currently Gmail give a personalised ad service depending on the data of email content and therefore make suggestions based on that content.
These are just a few examples and although we do not know whether Google or any other search engine use these as crawlable options, there`s the possibility of these areas being utilised by the SEO industry in the future and it raises the question of whether anything will be off limits.
