SEO experts predict that in 2010 ........

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has always been an important aspect of building traffic to your website. The experts are predicting that you should take special note of the following SEO topics over the coming year.

Relevance and Specificity: As the volume of info on the web continues to grow, businesses will need to respond to customers’ demands for more focus. Your web content will be to be relevant to the key words you are using.  Stay focused on a niche market.  Customers’ are demanding more focused Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) so you need to respond to this by personalizing your site more, by having your visitors identify with what you have on offer. This can be done by tightening up key words and phrases and including specific products.

Stay with the Trends: Search engines are starting to pay more credence to publication date, geographical location of businesses, connection to mobile device browsers, past behavior and social media content.  Your SEO strategy should result in regular, fresh  web content, linkage to social media networks and as much information about your business as possible – local offices, promotion of international trading  etc.

Site load time: It seems that Google at least may start using website loading speed as another ranking factor. You should be taking steps to ensure that the order of items on your page does not affect upload time and that your HTML and CSS are not cumbersome. Having to wait around too long for your site to come up is a great excuse for visitors to leave! Tools such as WebPageTest and Pingdom Page Load can help you test and correct long upload times. 

Leveraging social networks: There's already been so much written about being active in social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn etc, etc. Many internet marketers became active in building social networks in 2009 and in the near term will learn to monetize these media, by building a virtual community, socializing, developing more interesting interactions and less hard selling. These connections will not only help with your reputation (see below) but also add to your page ranking.

Maintaining your Reputation: Real-time search updates in Google SERPs may be useful for surfers, but it is becoming problematic for website owners. This means that you will need to keep abreast of any negative/angry comments about you or your products appearing anywhere on cyberspace, including the social networks and blogs. You can monitor the mention of your name, website or products with various Twitter tools. Two other free tools are Social mention and WhosTalkin. Note that some experts predict that real-time updates are becoming a potential hot potato and that Google at least will soon drop the feature.

Centralizing content: The strategy of diversifying your content in order to build backlinks is well know. Many people maintain blogs linking back to their main website. Some experts are suggesting that search engine like Google will prefer more activity and content diversity on the same site. So consolidation is something to think about.

Link Diversity: Many people are under the impression that it is important to get as many backlinks to their website as possible - no matter where they come from. In 2010, the trend will continue regarding the importance of link diversity and not just quantity. This means obtaining links from blogs, forums, articles, press releases, news, reviews, directories, links from different geographical regions, as well as containing good anchor text.

I hope these points will give you plenty to think about in further optimizing your website during 2010. For complete courses on this topic, please check out the SEO sub-category in the NimdX category.

To your success,

Mike Firer

NimdX Admin