I have traveled the World Wide Web sitting in front of my MacBook Pro with SEO on the top of my mind the past 364 days since my last post. Fun fact: The Egyptian calendar year had 360 “real” days with the last five days as one huge New Year’s Eve party to make up the difference of the orbit. SEO and myself have been through many changes and improvements this year. My first part explains our journey of the past. My second part explains how SEO should stay true to its roots of human communication without getting caught up in the attraction of newness I witnessed.

What I have done between posts

• Worked at Walmart while working on SEO.
• Left Walmart to take up my own SEO last December.
• Earned three marvelous clients.
• Applied for great SEO jobs. I am still applying for them if you’re still wondering.
• Learned an abundance of SEO knowledge from awesome resources and my own trials and errors. I have learned more than just SEO. I have learned the coolness of the history of computers, Internet, search engines and oh so much more.
• Learned SEO is only one cog in Internet marketing. I just can not get enough of the likes of e-mail marketing, PPC, social media, inbound marketing, conversion rate optimization, Web development just to name a few. I like having friends.
• Applied much of this information to my SEO efforts and enjoyments.

What SEO & the search industry has done between posts

• Became better friends with Google Panda and Penguin.
• Became friends with Google Authorship.
• Became friends with Facebook Graph Search.
• Learned of Bing Snapshot.
• Greeted Marissa Mayer as Yahoo!’s CEO.
• Feared for its life from Chinese hackers and saboteurs cutting undersea Internet cables.

What my thoughts on the future of SEO are

The Internet and World Wide Web are tweenagers. The Internet is around 65 years old. The World Wide Web is around 24 years old. Browsers and search engines are around 20 years old. I love learning more people are gaining and using Internet access, especially from previously impervious countries. This amount of growing data is great but still too young to really understand and what to make of all of it.

SEO has had a lot of change and improvements to communicate best between our clients to our customers this past year. I thought SEOs were using new outlets more while forgetting the foundation of interaction this past year. Means of human communication may change but the soul of communication will not. Hieroglyphs to smoke signals to emoticons: all share the human desire of expression. 

Updates, fancy Internet gadgets, platforms and tools mean well but all are subject to improvement. Newness is fleeting. You’re only new the first time. SEO has to be more than just a band-aid for technology. What is our identity? What are our roots? Times change but the core of strategically sound and creatively brilliant SEO will stay the same. Always promoting the new “new” is a feeble business model. Humans can see right through new if it is the same or worse than the old on our screens.

SEO is a unique form of advertising because it brings in all of the Internet marketing forms. SEO involves the cooperation of other healthy Internet channels to best communicate with our customers about our companies. There are a lot of ways to do this but we must remember all of them need to have the equal amount of strategy and creativity to satisfy our customers.