A couple of days ago I sat in on a webinar by Rand Fishkin CEO of SEOmoz (@randfish) and Dharmesh Shah CTO from HubSpot (@dharmesh), where they revealed the findings from an SEO Industry Survey, and shared their thoughts on the future of SEO, in The State of SEO and Internet Marketing 2012.

What I learned in this webinar is important for anyone involved with marketing and lead generation, hence this blog - even if you don't quite have a handle on SEO you will find this artilce valuable.

The research included 4431 respondents from US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand from March to May 2012. The following is a list of marketing services that have had the greatest increase in demand.

• Social and community management
• SEO
• Local SEO
• Content Marketing
• Analytics
• Copywriting and Blogging
• A/B testing for ROI
• Conversion tracking for ROI
• Competitive analysis

The takeaway for business owners and marketers: Is to make sure these tactics are part of your marketing and lead generation strategy.

Why SEO is an important tactic for lead generation

• It’s no surprise that more and more people are conducting searches online, but did you know that there are 3 billion searches per day on Google alone?
• Paid search and paid advertising are like renting. You own nothing and once you stop paying the value stops.
• Organic, or Inbound SEO is an asset that builds over time, your links and authority build over time and can’t be taken away. Inbound SEO builds your online footprint that lasts forever.
• Inbound SEO also gives you a presence on multiple channels increasing your reach, for example people will share a great blog article on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

The Future of SEO

Why Google’s Search Algorithm Updates Pengiun and Panda Are Important!

• The recent updates to Google's algorithm, known as Panda and Penguin have changed the way marketers need to approach their SEO Strategy. 
• The Panda update is focused on Content; penalising sites for duplicate content.
• The Penguin update is focused on links; penalising companies that have been trying to trick the search engines with buying links.
• The reason for these updates is to improve the user experience by rewarding the companies who are doing it right, building links by publishing quality and valuable content that naturally attracts links.
• Fishkin mentioned that Matt Cutts (from Google) recently announced the next Penguin update to their search algorithm is going to come down hard on purchased links.

Marketing Takeaway for business owners and marketers: The future of SEO means you are going to have to earn your links, not buy them.

So what does all this really mean for business owners and marketers? 

Here are the SEO Tips @randfish and @dharmesh shared on the webinar:

• It’s all about the user experience. Focus your SEO tactics on the human need, not the search engines.
• Website speed, load time are important as this too is part of the user experience you can check your page load time here: http://developers.google.com/speed
• Get the basics right first. Google’s webmaster tools is great for checking structure and crawlability. Here’s the link: www.google.com/webmasters.
• Pay it forward. Promote industry influencers and thought leaders chances are they are tracking their names and brands on social media and will comment and/or share which will help with your SEO.
• Create an incentive to share your content.  Give people a fun or interesting reason to share your content.
• Don’t beg influencers, involve them.
• Start with long tail keywords, that are highly relevant and easy to rank for, rather than high volume keywords that have a lot of competition.
• Don’t just aim for rankings, focus on Click Through Rates (CTR). Targeting highly relevant keywords will increase your CTR.
• Use an image or photo.
• Write a compelling 150 character meta description.
• Use keywords in your Page Title and URL.
• Delight users works shockingly well.  I love this tip, which means to be different from your competition.
• Choosing keywords: in addition to using Google’s Adword Tool or Hubspot’s Keyword Tool, use the auto suggest feature in Google’s Search Tool.

To wrap up what I learned from this webinar, my recommendation for SEO is to focus on building your online authority organically. Don’t look for quick results or ways to trick the search engines.

What your questions regarding SEO? Are you still wondering what it’s all about or it’s importance for lead generation? Share you questions below and I’ll do my best to provide you with the most update to answers.