Read I’m Not Dead! Why SEO is Important as Explained with Monty Python, Part 1 If she weighed the same as a duck… she’s made of wood. Having a professional SEO Specialist who can dig into your website code and understand how a search engine will read and crawl your site is critical in gaining organic traffic and domain authority. Even with some of the top developers and marketers you need to have an expert on hand that can give you explanations on what is going on with the website. Google and Bing make so many minute changes there is no way a developer who has to keep up with the latest coding practices, or a marketer trying to keep up to date with the latest marketing trends, will be able to keep up. The traditional tips and tricks of the trade for SEO have been completely turned on its head because of the rapid deployment of Google’s algorithms. These side algorithms like Panda, Penguin, Pigeon, and even Pirate are just the most well-known of the anti-spam algorithms Google has been running and evolving since 2012. The topping on this is Google Hummingbird algorithm, which if you haven’t heard about it don’t worry, most people haven’t. That is because Hummingbird is Google. Introduced in August 2013, it is the main algorithm that Google uses to present search results. When you search for “Holiday Gift Ideas” you are actually working with the Hummingbird algorithm. So using the Monty Python logic of detecting a witch does not have the same correlation with search engines in the least bit. If search engines get better at user experience it does not mean SEO is dead. It just evolves with the search engine. Ministry of Silly Marketing This is actually one of the biggest reasons to have an SEO Specialist working on your website. The Ministry of Silly Marketing runs deep and if left unchecked can really be a detriment to both your site and user experience. Marketers are always looking for new ways to reach out to a wider audience whilst retaining current relations with customers. It’s a highly tricky and quickly shifting industry so digital marketing seems like the best solution a marketer could ever ask for and is, if used correctly. There will always be marketers who are trying to be forward thinking by pushing a blog, or creating a pop-up survey, or even having an interactive map feature. These can all be very good assets if done correctly. However, in the mad rush to do the latest marketing trend there are a lot of digital marketing basics that can be overlooked that will actually be detrimental to your organic rankings and the user experience for your website. Not all websites need a blog but all websites need to have fresh content. This can be done other ways instead of having an inactive blog hidden on a sub-folder of your website. Not all websites need a pop-up survey or an interactive map feature. These depend on the audience and if there is any geo-location details that could derail the site. The Ministry of Silly Marketing will always be present and there will always be SEO Specialists here to re-aim the efforts into the best digital marketing strategy possible. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition! Just like the Spanish Inquisition, no one expects a new search engine algorithm change. Not even the experts. Algorithmic changes to search engines can and do have major effects on your website’s traffic and visibility in SERPs. Google announces most of their larger algorithmic changes after they roll them out to the public. However, not every change is highly publicized and the potential impact cannot be felt until sometime later. These algorithms change frequently and with only post-launch notification. Having an expert on call who can detect when new algorithms are coming through and how they are impacting the site is crucial to thriving in the digital marketing space. Bing is not as active in the ways of new algorithms, but it does have its own unique twists that need to be maneuvered when looking at a website. On top of that Yahoo, which is currently powered by Bing, is now the default search engine for Mozilla Firefox version 34. These little changes and insights enable developers and marketers alike to better understand the website. The algorithms may be like the Spanish Inquisition but SEO will always be expected as long as search engines exist. It is a vital component to any digital marketing strategy.