Identity is big, very big. I am always shocked by the refusal of most clients to pay much more than reg fee for a winning domain that almost locks up identity by itself. They drop $2000 for a 60 second video, throw it on YouTube and then are surprised when social media traffic doesn’t rain down upon them. Meanwhile, ask someone to drop $3000 on a domain that will rocket to the top of Google and they just can’t pull the trigger.

But I agree many of us have seen the value of structured markup for a long time. Cue the links to old “how to abuse abbrev tags for keyword stuffing” posts. But I see quite a gap between those who recommend good, valid structured HTML and those doing search optimizations, and the gap involves intent. I don’t use the quote tag because I want my quotes to be found in search. Blame Google, but my article about Mimi’s Garden will not (currently) be returned as a match by Google if that possessive apostrophe is “properly” marked up. Cue the link to my old “a simple Wordpress Plugin to turn off texturizer” post.

Identity is big right now… reviews are big…images, videos… the search engines are pushing their rules out to us and if webmasters are not aware of the potential downsides associated with strict adherence to these “good webmastering” guidelines, we’ll be forced to choose between silent censorship and wholesale acceptance of our marginalization (thanks Todd!)

As search engines continue to consume the web I think that trend highlights the increasing importance of social networking & branding & building direct trust. If the only way a person adds value is through creating perceived value then they are still miles ahead of the person creating tons of value and giving it all away.