Look ahead if you will - to the future! We’ll all wear silver jumpsuits and drive teardrop-shaped flying cars. These will be polished to a reflective sheen by our robot butlers. That’s cool, but as an SEO guy I have to ask: “SEO is changing every day, so what will I be doing to pay for my flying car and faithful robot butler in say, ten years’ time?”

Read the title. What does it mean? “Vertical marketing” is a response to an increasing trend toward niche searches and finely divided communities. Vertical markets have always existed, of course. Not a lot of people need pelagic hydraulic fluids, for example. (In fact, even though I toured the linked site, I’m still not 100% sure what they are!) Increasingly, natural vertical markets are being joined by niches that have been “verticalized” by the evolving nature of searches and communities.

Graywolf’s article on the how Google gives bad Wikipedia pages privilege got me thinking. So did Demerzel’s “Future of Google Search Results.” When I’m analyzing the SERPs for a specific keyword I increasingly note that Wikipedia’s hogging the first position, even its doesn’t really have much to say. Youtube’s up there as well. That’s cool for casual searches, but when someone’s looking for serious information, 90% of the time Youtube’s going to be a bit too wacky for the job.

I’ve written a guest article on Five Steps to Successful Niche Marketing for the folks at Hoover Web Design. Check it out!

We’d like to hear from other writers who want to say something about SEO, Internet marketing, social media and the other stuff that we regularly talk about. If you’re interested in writing an article that’s content-focused (that means wacky SEO bot-gaming is secondary) and has a few modest links to stuff you like and are willing to link back to it from your own blog, drop me a line. Make sure to propose a subject and link to your other work.

At first, keyword selection is a balancing act. You want to find a niche, but not one so obscure it won’t generate leads. Good keyword research and a thorough understanding of the standard terms used in the client’s industry provide a good start, but even if you do a great job out the gate, you always look forward to new analytics to help you refine your strategy. Long tail keywords are one of the first steps in a maturing plan.For example, look at Wild Birds Choice (http://www.wildbirdschoice.com). They’re a client of ours. I’m going to tell you exactly what I did to explore long tail keywords, step by step.

You want visitors. Visitors mean leads! Why aren’t you getting them? There are lots of answers. The lack of an audience is not one of them. Do you like ray guns? Dinosaur jokes? If the Web has demonstrated one thing, it’s that there’s pretty much no topic that doesn’t have its share of devotees.

We’ve written a guest article for PC4Media.net . Check out Your Company is Already on the Internet.

Long before I started working in SEO I was an educator for an organization that taught computer skills to total neophytes. You learn a lot from working with completely fresh users. It makes you realize how much of your ability comes from deeply ingrained basic assumptions and how these can work for or against you.

Thanks to Rosalind Gardner, we’ve had the opportunity to post a guest article that explains GILL Media’s blogging philosophy. Check it out!