DAO (Digital Asset Optimization); With the acronym DAO floating around everywhere these days, it might make you wonder; Is DAO replacing Search Engine Optimization? The answer is no, in fact DAO can best be described as the evolution of search engine optimization (SEO), SEO is not dead, but it is rapidly evolving. In recent years, the emphasis has shifted from focusing on “page elements” to off-site criteria. It started with Google PageRank. PageRank is defined as a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weight to a website, for the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance on the World Wide Web (wikipedia.com 02/12/08). In simpler terms, Google counts each external link to a website as a vote for that website, it also measures how relevant each of those voting websites is to the content of the linked website; in essence we are measuring the popularity of a website. What does PageRank have to do with DAO? DAO is all about moving the focus of our optimization efforts from the text on a page to more relevant assets on a website, regardless of where it takes us. It’s all about helping the search engine find the most relevant website based on their criteria and the content that is important to them, not just the text on a page.
The bottom line is that companies need to figure out how to best fine-tune their search marketing strategies to maintain a competitive advantage. The best way to achieve this is to focus the right balance of your resources on standard text optimization, as well as optimizing and promoting all other digital assets. You may be wondering when is the right time to start making this change. The answer is: right now! Search engines already have their systems in place to measure the relevance of a website’s digital assets and are constantly focused on improving these systems and making them a more prominent part of their search systems. The only question is how long it will take users to realize that they have these resources at their disposal.
Both Google’s universal search and Ask3D’s new interface show users more information from more sources (news, images, products, videos, etc.) on the first page of results than ever before. This change in the way search engines present search results illustrates the need to consider more types of media than standard text documents. The growth of universal search means that the types of search results that SEO consultants have become accustomed to and optimizing for are either disappearing or in decline. Finding new ways to optimize any electronic file that can be crawled, indexed, categorized and sorted is where the opportunity lies. It’s about much more than just optimizing social media, it’s about “the big picture,” having the ability to optimize the entire internet, making all content easier to find through search rather than just having to rely on text documents. These days, it’s becoming more common for companies to produce a variety of different types of content, and search engines are doing everything they can to index that content. The success of a search engine is directly related to its ability to adapt to changes in the market, this means that those of us who use these search engines to market our websites must also adapt. With such intense competition and so much money at stake, the major search providers will continue to improve the user experience, making it easier to find whatever you’re looking for.
The trend in search is shifting from optimizing for a slow and relatively dumb engine, and moving toward highly sophisticated integration of elements, including images, videos, consumer reviews, social media, and more. This means that we need to start fine-tuning what needs to be optimized from the platform to the actual asset itself. This is what makes DAO the future of internet marketing. DAO sees the platform simply as the vehicle that gets the content directly to the search engine, unlike SEO, which focuses almost exclusively on getting the platform to the search engine and hoping (or hoping) that the content is discovered by the search engine. For example, by understanding how videos can be optimized, a search campaign can be successful on Google or YouTube. So the future of SEO as defined today is bound to change. The days of successful optimization for 10 text links on a standard results page will be over soon.
As long as there are search engines, there will be some form of optimization to improve search engine visibility. Businesses must consider all the digital assets they have to work with to provide both search engines and customers with the information they seek in the formats they will respond to. Comprehensive optimization begins with an inventory of a company’s digital assets. Text, images, audio and video all need to be considered when determining what we need to optimize, we no longer need to wait for the client to find us through text optimization so we can impress them with our other digital assets. Matching digital assets with distribution channels gives marketers even more opportunities to reach customers, as each channel can independently drive traffic and improve a website’s standard search visibility. Digital asset optimization isn’t just a better definition of the future of search marketing; is the future of search marketing.
