Briefly, we can say that there are 5 major steps in terms of SEO.

1. SEO began with search engine submission in the early days due to the fact that search engines had limited crawling capabilities.
2. Then, it turned into on-page SEO, meaning the art of ensuring a website is technically accessible to search engines and relevant to the targeted keywords.
3. Since Google – which quickly became the major search engine from 2000 – introduced its notion of PageRank, the acquisition of quality back links the dominant factor in the early years of the decade.
4. In order to face link spam, Google algorithm began to take into account contextual information of a backlink and especially its  anchor text.
5. In the same logic, the notion of TrustRank appears meaning that the more a backlink comes from a trusted sources  the more it is valuable. Domain authority mainly came from the age of the domain name.
6. Link context became more and more important mainly because link exchanges. Google started to consider that the placement of links on a page and, more importantly, the context of the page and the site the link is on is of utmost importance .
7. Additionnaly, user signals – such as click through rates, bounce rates and search patterns – became to be taken into account by search engines to assess the level of trust search engines have in a site.
8. Finally, major search engines – among which Google is the more advanced – decided to include multimedia and real-time content to match better user’s needs.

See below for more details:

SEO History (1994-2001) - Greenlight

SEO History 2 (2002-2009) - Greenlight

The Taraxacum's Paradigm in Online Communications

Multi-Channel Communication Strategy: The Taraxacum’s Paradigm

This is an interesting metaphor to illustrate how your communications should spread. Once defined accordingly to your target audience, your key messages should flow through different channels – combining offline and online means. Such a process could be named « taraxacoms ».

Taraxacoms, an eMarketing Consultancy dedicated to Social Media in European Affairs

The original concept was first brought by Antoine Peeters – a Brussels-based social media expert – who recently created his own consultancy Taraxacoms. Having met him, I strongly advise you to attend his regular workshops on social media to better understand its impact on European affairs.

European Affairs and SMO (Social Media Optimization)

In this context, social media plays a major role to help you increase your online visibility. While you should also aim for optimizing your online press releases, the strategic use of social media will multiply the gates to which your messages can be discovered by your target groups.

Hereby, comes the concept of SMO (Social Media Optimization) a subset of Social Media Marketing (SMM) consisting into promoting a brand, a product or a service through social media. Generally speaking, SMO is also ideal for Online Reputation Management (ORL).

I will not comment on the content of this conference, where I didn’t learn so much about SEO.  I would rather concentrate on aspects a bit more anecdotal, such as Google offices in Brussels or meeting with Matt Cutts.

About Google Belgium

For your information, the Google Belgium’s offices are located at Chaussee d’Etterbeek, 180, near Parc Leopold, at the heart of the EU quarter. This is not trivial, as one of the reasons of Google being present Belgium is that Google Inc. is not only interested to develop is business over here. Google Inc. also wants to better to better understand the European institutions to eventually lobby the EU policy-making process.

Indeed, this is hardly a secret that the Google Inc.’s privacy policy is not so much appreciated by the EU institutions. Google’s office in Brussels is therefore also dedicated to better inform EU decision-markers and EU of Google’s intentions. By the way, I strongly recommend you to read the Google Europe Policy Blog which aims at explaining Google’s view on EU policies. It is a quite interesting way to mix public relations, public affairs and web 2.0.

Matt cutts and myself at Google Belgium

About Matt Cutts

As an engineer, Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group at Google Inc., specializing in SEO issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and advising the public on how to get better website visibility on the SERPs.

As far as I am concerned, I was impressed by passion and ease in communicating complex SEO issues and especially its high availability. He answered all the questions from the public. More than that, he agreed to be photographed with Gregory and myself. He even accepted to answer a personal question about the way spam report works. The video will soon be published. What a day!

Question asked to Matt Cutts

Edit: Below is the famous video featuring Matt Cutts with myself asking the following question: How long does it take for a spam report to be taken into account by Google?

Conclusion: Be online, be visible, be influent online!

In any case, it conforts me that EU lobbyists must really integrate in their strategy eMarketing tools such as Web Analytics, SEO, SEM or SMO. Nowadays, these tools are becoming more and more essential to influence key EU decision-makers and stakeholders.

Choosing an SEO consultant, SEOmoz weekly Friday whiteboard

If you are facing this problem, we strongly recommend that you take a look a this very instructive video from SEOmoz consultants. And, in any case, if you need to hire an SEO consultant, don’t hesitate to contact us.

• Optimizing the architecture to ensure the website is crawled and indexed by search engines
• Optimizing the content to ensure the website includes the right keywords at the right places
• Optimizing the incoming links to ensure the website receive quality incoming links from relevant domains

An interesting article from the website SEOchat has been trying to verify these statements while focusing primarily on the the incoming link which is one of the most important search engine ranking factor. Basing his analysis on SEOmoz search engine ranking factors, with a particular emphasis on the top five ranking factors, the author demonstrates on which factors it is important to concentrate one’s efforts. We strongly invite you to have a lot a this article.

The conclusion confirms SEOmoz study and totally goes in line with what we have been doing in our eMarketing agency. Actually, the most seems to make sure that incoming links use the targeted keywords in the anchor text and come from relevant related domains.

The end of SEO?

Indeed, the SERPS are now more complex, personalized and constantly evolving depending on the behaviour of the Internet users.  In this context, it is legitimate to ask: Will SEO still exist in five years? On February 26, 2009, Google software engineer Matt Cutts  answered this question in one of his weekly video:

Yes, I think SEO will still exist in 5 years. Google tries to make it so that you don’t need to be an SEO expert, but SEO in some sense is almost like a resume. In the same way that you polish a resume, you figure out how to put your best foot forward.

Google’s Acquisition Strategy

Below is a mapping of Google Inc.  acquisitions.

White Hat SEO

As a SEO consultant in Brussels, I only White Hat SEO techniques to help my client increase their presence and visibility on the Internet. These techniques provide long-lasting qualified traffic on your website.

SEO Audit

Before implementing any SEO strategy, I always perform a SEO audit to check possible blocking factors. This is the preliminary step before the actual optimization of a website.

On-site SEO

On-site SEO refers to search engine optimization techniques that are performed on your own website or page, and are therefore termed “on-site”.

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO refers to search engine optimization techniques that are not performed on your own website or page, and are therefore termed “off-site.” Typically, it involves the implementation of a link building campaign to generate backlinks to your website.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO involves that are used to get higher search engine rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

• Breaking search engine rules,
• creating a poor user experience directly because of the Black Hat SEO techniques used on the website,
• and presenting content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

Nowadays, there are two tendancies regarding Black Hat SEO:

1. autogeneration of content, generally rewrited, to appear as unique and thus relevant for search engines,
2. and the autogenerationof backlinks through the use of spamware (i.e. automated comment spam from bots) .

Black Hat SEO techniques generally provide short-term visibility in terms of search engine rankings, but if you are discovered utilizing these spammy techniques on your Website, you run the risk of being seriously penalized by search engines.

Grey Hat SEO

Finally, Grey Hat SEO techniques, those that are neither really white nor black hat, include purchase of links and parasite hosting. While such techniques can be very effective, it really has be used in an elegant manner if you don’ t want to get a spam report.

Overview of SEO techniques

Below is a diagram illustrating the scope of the different SEO techniques.

As you can see, high value White Hat SEO techniques are the following:

• on-site optimization based on keyword research,
• linkbait through the production of high-quality content with a viral potential.

Backlinks will naturally come from using the above mentioned techniques.

Combining SEO with SMO techniques

Very important, I strongly advise to combine SEO with SMO (Social Media Optimization) techniques. Going on social media through the creation of a blog or using a microblogging tool like Twitter can help you build a strong reputation online.

A profession at the intersection of technology, marketing and statistics

Being a webmarketer in Brussels is very challenging, especially when dealing with European affairs. Not only you have to possess a sound knowledge of how things work in the Brussels bubble but you also have to be somehow a technologist, a marketer and a statistician at the same time. This first diagram perfercly illustrates the complexity of our profession.

What does a SEO consultant?

If you are a SEO consultant, you have probably been confronted to the inexpertimentation of a client. And I would dare to say I generally dedicate more time explaining why SEO is a worhwile cost-effective channel rather than actually optimizing websites. This also the reason of the existence of our glossary dedicated to eMarketing. This second diagram I think perfectly illustrates this problem.

That’s why, I also provide dedicated trainings on eMarketing to my clients. This is the best way to raise awareness about SEO issues and eventually turn your attendants into future clients.