The SEO Landscape Is Changing

If you finally gotten your site to appear on Google’s first page for your keyword, then I have some bad news for you. The SEO landscape is changing, dramatically. The search engines are shifting from web indexes to content aggregators and this could have some serious consequences for the success of your small business blog.

An web index is a list of sites that contain a specific keyword, the keyword the search visitor typed in. It’s what most search engines have *served* to their visitors for years.

Content Aggregators are a list of sites that contain specific key words, and contain a preview of your content.  (Note: Black hat SEO geeks who stuff key words into the body of their page are going to pay a price for this practice.  A terrible price.)

With the advent of Bing.com comes a great new opportunity for your web success.  And while Bing.com currently only has a tiny portion of the market share, this is about to change as well thanks to a 10 year deal signed by Microsoft and Yahoo. Who knows, Google will probably follow suit as well.

Searchers can now hover over the link they want to know more about, and presto! A preview of the content and navigation links automagically shows up.

Where The Hover Content Comes From

Bing.com is grabbing the text copy from the first chuck of non-heading, non-linking text on the page returned. For blogs, this will most likely be the latest post text. For websites, hopefully, this is a short description of the contents on the site.

And since Bing.com also grabs the links list from any text-based primary navigation on the page, it’s important to clean up those fancy javascript based navigation links in favor of text-based CSS styled links.

Clickability Just Became King

It’s no longer enough to have a good ranking. You now also have to be clickable. Visitors will be presented with the salient facts about your site before they visit, so craft your message, your text and your links with care.

Traffic to you site matters, but quality matters more. *More Traffic* shouldn’t be your business goal, unless it’s targeted and specific. And since they will no longer have to click the link to determine if your site is what they are looking for, you need to define what you offer and make that visible to the new aggregators.

The Good Ole Days Are Gone

Gone are the days when higher rankings meant more traffic from a search engine. You now have to wear two hats when getting new visitors. The marketer and the search engine optimization specialist. Ignore one and the traffic you relied on will dry up. Ignore both, and you could find yourself talking to an empty room.

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About The Author

Cenay Nailor is an Internet, Affiliate and Networking Marketing success coach with mad technical skills she loves sharing. Visit her blog and sign up for a weekly injection of Tech-Based Marketing help, sent right to your inbox. http://www.CenayNailor.com

About The Author

Dali Burgado, also known as "The Dali Blogger" teaches creative entrepreneurs how to carve a web presence that connects with their Inner Guru and their target audience. Her first online marketing love is SEO. She's an avid connector on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. When she's not coaching or teaching, she's tweaking sites for Search Engine Visibility, working on her PHP and Javascript coding skills, Singing Opera, or learning about gardening. Circle Dali on Google+