Cameron to admit ‘debt mistakes’
David Cameron is to say in a speech that the Conservatives did not recognise the problem of unsustainable debt soon enough.
Last night I pondered the future of Search Engine Optimization, particularly the effects of Universal Search and it’s full implementation, and while some of these changes have already started to show, yet others have yet to be fully implemented.
I came up with a list of 5 primary attributes that I feel will be essential to SEO in 2009. If your site is struggling to rank and get visitors, implementing these items in your site may help it rise from the ashes. Conversely, if your site is ranking well, but you continue to exclude them, you may lose your high ranking position, and it won’t take long.
Social Profiles and Activity
- With the continuing evolution of the Internet, and increased adoption of web 2.0 functionality, social profiles and activity are going to take on a more important role in the eyes of a search engine.
- Interaction with others through social communities will allow businesses to create and manage their reputations Online, as well as provide company info, and respond to customers inquiries and requests in a real time basis, thereby separating the companies that have adopted Social Media from those who simply provide their info in a one way, traditional fashion (think newspaper, or web 1.0).
- The people and companies that engage their customers through social media will have a more content rich Online profile, and as a result, should achieve higher importance to the Search Engines.
Interactive sites will be essential
- Because of Universal Search, and the listing of media in the search results, text will no longer dominate the Search Engine Results Pages.
- All other forms of media will take on a more important role in the search engine results. Because there are relatively fewer images, videos and music on the web (in relation to text documents), the search engines are hungry for all types of media, and those sites that integrate multimedia into their user experience will have a greater propensity for showing up in the SERP’s.
- Some of the items that webmasters will want to integrate into their site to create a more interactive user experience will include:
- Pictures
- Video
- Audio
- Maps
- News
- Blogs
Analytics Programs Become the True Measure of SEO Success
Analytics will be the key to gauging your optimization efforts, and these are some of the factors that may become more important to your site’s rankings:
- Bounce Rate - If you are using Google Analytics, it will be very easy for them to gauge your visitor interaction, and bounce rate may be one of the key factors used in determining your rankings. If they are able to see that a visitor entered your site through a specific keyword, and your site has a higher bounce rate than other sites for the same keyword, your position in the SERP’s may be lowered. The logic being that other sites keep more visitors for that keyword, so they must be providing better content.
- Page Views - a second factor that would be very easy to judge (if you are using Google Analytics), would be the number of pages viewed on your site. If a site visitor enters your site through a specific keyword, and continues to browse through your entire site, chances are they found compelling information that caused them to review your site’s content in depth. If they only view one or two pages, they must not have found what they are looking for, and have left the site to seek another source.
- Time on Site - If the above listed information is not available to the search engine, the overall determining factor may be the amount of time on the site. Without an analytics program to give detailed information about the site interaction, the only variable that can be measured is if you enter a site through a search engine, and then return to the search engine to run another query. While this is not an exact measurement, it can provide the search engines enough information to determine the average amount of time spent on your site.
- Helpful? - It may be helpful for the search engines to have this information in some instances, but I feel that it would be far more beneficial to the webmaster, site owner and search engine optimization Company to keep this data to themselves, thus avoiding any kind of penalty that may be implemented by Google if they don’t like what they see.
Local Search Becomes More Important
- Based on the increased efforts at Search “Personalization”, local search will become more important, and those seeking placement on a national or global scale will have to focus on local search methods to show up in an area outside of their local market.
- A user searching for flowers in Denver may find completely different results than a user in Seattle. The national companies that ship throughout the country, or internationally, will have a new challenge to contend with, and may see a significant decrease in their traffic from other areas.
- More small businesses are going to be in the SEO arena, as more and more businesses close, leading to more sales conducted Online = local search becomes more important.
Traditional optimization factors are still important
- Content is still king as it engages site visitors and improves site interaction - the difference now is that content includes items other than text - pictures, audio, video, etc…
- Links still matter, but social links are more important, and editorial links and internal link structure become more important, while the value of links from paid sources such as directories continues to diminish.
- Good site navigation leads to a more interactive experience, so having an easy to navigate site is essential to increasing user interaction and increasing the time a user spends on your website.
- Internal link structure still ensures that the bots crawl all the content and direct link equity to the important pages of a site.
- Links within multimedia content, like watermark links within video and image content start to carry value, similar to anchor text.
Those are just a few of the ideas I have about the direction search engine optimization will take in 2009. There are many more options, and some of those may not become valid, but it’s already apparent that including more engaging content and creating a broad Online profile will be important to a web site’s overall importance in the eyes of the search engines.
HighPoint Search Marketing is an Internet Marketing Company specializing in Search Engine Optimization, Video SEO, Corporate Blog Management, Online Reputation Management and Link-Building Techniques.
To see what a Search Engine Optimization campaign can do for your business, visit HighPoint Search Marketing at http://highpointseo.com