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An SEO expert is an individual who has advanced knowledge in the field of search engine optimization. An SEO expert has the experience and know how to rank a site in search results. He or she can also answer difficult questions regarding ranking strategies.
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Conversation about SEO between Jeff Dedrick and Dan Thies

Dan Thies
http://www.seoresearchlabs.com

Dan is a long time veteran of the web marketing wars… author/publisher of SEO Fast Start (www.seoresearchlabs.com/seo-book.php), first published in 2001, the 4th edition is now a free download from his site.

Dan is also the author of the SitePoint Search Engine Marketing Kit (www.seoresearchlabs.com/kit), and a frequent speaker at Search Engine Strategies (www.searchenginestrategies.com) and other events.

What changes do you see Google making in the next year or two and its impact on website owners and their search engine ranking?

Google will do a lot of things that seem random, like opening a video store… none of this has any real impact on those concerned with search engines.

The main changes we can expect from Google are greater refinements in link analysis and spam filtering, as they lead the way among search engines in creating a new map of the web.

I expect Google to launch something comparable to Yahoo stores, get into the auction business, and try more experiments like Google Base. Some of these things will have an impact on search marketing because Google will integrate them into the search tools and portal as they did with Froogle.

What changes do you see Yahoo making in the next year or two and its impact on website owners and their search engine ranking?

Yahoo will have to switch their pay-per-click bidding system to match what Google has been doing with Adwords. This will make Yahoo’s PPC platform more competitive, and drive a great deal more profit into their search engine. This in turn will enable them to promote the value of their search engine.

To become more important in the SEO world, Yahoo must attract more users to their search engine, but even with a large increase in the user base, the search results are still formatted to favor the paid listings.

Yahoo will need to catch up with Google in the area of link analysis, but there’s no reason why they can’t. At this point, Yahoo’s researchers appear to have a fairly naive view of spam, and if this doesn’t change, it will remain fairly easy to manipulate Y! search results.

What are the changes that the other search engines will be making or must make to compete against Google and Yahoo in the future?

MSN has great technology, but like Yahoo, they’re fairly easy to spam. MSN’s analysis of web pages may be superior to what Google and Yahoo do, but they have to get better and doing link analysis. Ask.com is so far from competitive right now, it’s hardly worth speculating what they might do, since they’ll do something between disappearing and getting good at search.

What are your predictions on technology that the search engines will introduce in the next year or two and its affect on website owners?

We can expect more things like Google Site Maps, and other tools that allow you to give the search engine more information about your web site.
More efforts to index “hidden” content on dynamic sites, and to get to the deeper content (old news articles, etc) and transient content (job listings that may be live for only a day or two).

Everyone keeps saying that the vortals (vertical/niche search engines) are coming, but if vortals happen in a big way, it’s more likely to be as an option on the big search engines. You already see Google throwing flight search results up, shopping search, etc. and as search engines get better at understanding the user’s intent, they’ll get better at delivering search results that really help the user.

What do you believe website owners will have to concentrate on to have their websites either stay or become highly ranked in the search engines in the next couple years?

On the site, unique content and usability, because “user feedback” captured via toolbars, audience panels, and other methods will start to influence search results.
For SEO, more attention to the internal linking and site structure, to draw attention to most important pages on the site.
Better linking strategies, and a lot more natural website promotion to draw links and traffic and boost the brand.
Finally, and maybe most important, working on improving the conversion rate - making the most out of every visitor by bringing them to the right page, delivering the right message, and making the buyer feel safe… those who make more money from the traffic will have more resources to do the other things that make rankings happen.

Most people know that the search engines are cleaning up and de-listing a lot of the sites that have been created using bad site generation software. What is the future of sites that have been created using site generation software and what can current generated sites do about it?

Here’s a novel idea: instead of trying to siphon off a few nickels with a robo-site, why not actually create a useful resource with unique content? It’s not that hard, and you don’t have to look over your shoulder all the time.

Those who have been caught and penalized should dump the domain name and consider it the SEO equivalent of Chernobyl; those who haven’t been penalized have a choice. The “keyword driftnets” will probably still work (albeit with short lifetimes for any given site) to draw a little traffic, but it’s very hard to build a large income that way, and it isn’t going to get any easier.

What are your predictions on duplicate content and how Google and Yahoo will filter this duplicate content in the future?

All of the search engines will continue to tighten up their filters on duplicate content, which will reduce the SEO impact of some strategies like article distribution and press releases. Fortunately, these things are pretty profitable anyway, so we’ll just write more articles, and the web will be richer for all that extra content.

Search engines will approach dupe filtering cautiously, because they don’t want to punish the original author and reward people who borrow, steal or plagiarize.

There are many current sites selling private label niche articles to its members. What changes would you suggest someone make to private label articles before adding them to their websites to avoid being duplicate content and how would these changes affect search engine rankings?

I would always write a unique introduction, first of all. Changing the author’s bio, changing hyperlinks within the article, and the like. It may get to the point where you can’t have a duplicate paragraph without further analysis and/or filtering taking place.

I approach article distribution and other content promotions as a three-step process, and distributing the article is only step one - the following steps are where we gain unique content and link placements, and develop partnerships with the people who reach our target audience

Summary : In Dan Thies opinion Google will continue to find and punish SEO spammers. Manipulating positions by link campaigns will become increasingly difficult and expensive, and it will require more weeks and months than it used to