When it comes to the future of search, Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) gets bandied about quite a bit. And perhaps you've heard the phrase, "DAO is the new SEO"? But what exactly is the difference between SEO and DAO? After all, if you optimize a web page, isn't that a digital asset?
True enough, it is. But SEO was born out of the need to make web pages crawler-friendly for easier indexing -- it begins and ends there. Does that mean there's a point between the two where you stop doing one and exclusively start doing the other? Absolutely not. As my colleague so eloquently puts it, SEO is still very much the "apple a day" the doctor recommends. You can't stop doing it, but you do need to supplement it with other efforts to achieve optimal performance.
DAO, in itself, is more about looking at all marketing collateral in all digital formats. Granted, this includes web pages. But it's more about looking at the types of files that traditional SEO techniques don't work as well with. With universal/blended search, end users can now expect to receive everything from PDFs to podcasts to audio/visual content in their search results. This provides marketers with a number of different options for building brands online and making clients' products and services visible.
Tapping into these "new signals to search engines" makes it possible to speed up the optimization and indexing process. For example, my esteemed colleague Mike Grehan -- our global KDM officer and co-chair of the Search Engine Strategies Global Advisory Board -- once made a short video promoting the SES Conference in London.
After recording and optimizing it, he uploaded the clip to YouTube, Metacafe and AOL Video. After that, he tagged and bookmarked it at various social media sites, such as Delicious and StumbleUpon.
He then sent out an email telling everyone on his contact list that the video was available. Within a matter of hours -- not days -- that video ranked at number one for a search on the conference. Now that's what I call the power of DAO!
But DAO isn't just about different file types; it's about different digital channels, too. For instance, when it comes to search, having your clients visible in local listings, news results, blogs and even Twitter is all part of new and evolving optimization methods. This new optimization also includes working with a huge range of applications and widgets, all of which go beyond traditional search in a browser.
Essentially, our optimization efforts must reflect the many ways customers now search and convey intent. It's important to incorporate all digital assets and mediums -- be it a mobile application, a widget or a browser -- into marketing efforts to increase the likelihood of reaching customers at the right moment. True, deciphering customer intent is much easier in search than it is in other mediums -- but we can still leverage this intelligence across mediums to connect to customers in whatever channel or format they prefer.
This is especially important as the web continues to grow exponentially. In fact, user-generated content now outnumbers traditional-mediated content by a factor of five to one. It's no wonder that Google and other search engines are now conceding that crawling the web is much more difficult than they thought ten years ago.
So where do we go from here? Well, it's time to start a dialogue, to truly understand the forces shaking up the search landscape, so that we as marketers can continue to reach customers in the most efficient and effective ways. Like it or not, online marketing is changing rapidly, and the better we prepare ourselves now, the more successful we'll be in creating experiences, content and offers that compel customers to respond, engage and convert.
Anton E. Konikoff is CEO of Acronym Media.
