Jamie O'Donnell, SEO-PR, interviews Simon Rouillier, NVI, at SES Toronto, 2011, on the current and future state of search marketing. Simon says that along with universal search, SEO continues to grow in importance as webmasters look at different ways of optimizing their websites, with a priority on link building. Having a good diversity of links from any authoritative source and making sure you have a lot of mentions will help boost your search rankings, including the use of social signals via social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Simon says search marketing is also impacted by the growing way social communities can be leveraged to help a website rank higher. Simon says posting relevant content to sites like Digg is a great way to promote content.
Simon says it's also more challenging for search marketers to help clients gain greater Web visibility because of the amount of content that needs to be optimized, including images, video, local results, and more.