For the opening session of
SMX Advanced, we were treated to a keynote by Bing’s Fabrice Canel. Here are my notes from that session.
Fabrice started by pointing out that search is becoming more intelligent. For example, search engines are getting better at sentiment analysis. If you search on whether video games are good for you, you’ll get one set of results, and if you search on whether they are bad for you, you’ll get a different set of results.
You can also get multiperspective answers offering different opinions. Bing does this in featured snippets, as shown here by this sample result:
As Bing prepares for continued growth in voice interactions, it is becoming more conversational in its approach to search.
For example, if a user asks a very broad query which could have several intents, Bing will ask a clarifying question, as you’ll see here:
And where it’s appropriate, search is becoming more visual.
More and more technology is being applied to help search become more human as well, allowing interactions with people to become more natural:
With all of this, search engine optimization (SEO) is evolving, too. The basics still apply. Be sure to optimize your web pages, and pay attention to:
Using title tags.
Meta descriptions.
Heading tags.
Writing great, descriptive content.
Ensuring your site is crawlable.
Basically, don’t forget your SEO 101!
So, what is new? There are many new destinations for content (desktop, mobile, voice) and many new ways to distribute and duplicate that content. There are new standards such as accelerated mobile pages (AMP) and much more.
Search engine optimization also has to deal with content being cached on content delivery networks (CDNs) and content being hosted in the cloud. This leads to new challenges with setting …
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