Aaron Wall of SEOBook recently predicted that, in 2013, SEOs who “remain overly-public will continue to invent language to serve their own commercial purposes while chastising those who do not fall in line.” I appear to be living up to (the first part) of that promise because I’m calling it: the breakthrough ranking factor of 2013 will be “waves,” a term I just made up.
This will be a somewhat speculative post, so I feel compelled to say that these opinions are my own, and don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of Northcutt as a whole.
Where did this crazy idea come from? It started with the realization that, back in 2009, Google’s Chief Economist told McKinsey Quarterly “I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s?”
Shopping around the web these days has become a frustrating affair. Not only is Google serving up obscure blogs on the first page, some of the largest players like Target seem to have forgotten that an excellent shopping experience is what turned them into a household name.
For example, try shopping for bath towels on Target.com. Type in “Fieldcrest towels,” in Google Search and Target comes up first place in the organic listing. Notice too that Target has paid for a PPC ad for “Fieldcrest towels.”
However, once you get to the website, good luck outfitting your bathroom. The towel is supposed to be available in a choice of colors: white/black stripe, white/grey, white/brown, white/green and white/taupe stripes. Yet, only the black stripe photo is displayed for all of the examples. Moreover, the two white/black stripe towels that are pictured are different. One has two stripes and one has four. So not only is the customer unable to see the color so that they can match it to their sea foam rug, they also haven’t a clue as to what design they are buying.
