Yesterday I attended SEOmoz's webinar titled "SEO Strategies for 2010". Some interesting factoids, comments and resources for SEO in 2010 were presented that I thought I'd highlight:
- Mobile browser search
- Mobile search and ecommerce will be a large area of growth in 2010.
- Google Webmaster Tools allows you to submit mobile sitemaps, which can help battle duplicate content between non-mobile and mobile versions of site content. Another way to handle duplicate content would be to write semantic HTML that allows sites to serve non-mobile and mobile CSS.
- Social Media: Real Time Search
- Real time search marked its presence in 2009. The involvement of Twitter in search is evolving.
- Tracking and monitoring on URL shortening services should be set up to measure traffic and benefit from Twitter.
- Dan Zarrella published research on The Science of Retweeting. This is an interesting resource with fascinating statistics on retweets.
- Social Media: Facebook's Dominance
- Recent research by comScore has shown that 5.5% of all time on the web is spent in Facebook.
- Facebook has very affordable advertising. Facebook has so much demographic and psychographic data that allows sites to deliver very targeted advertisements.
- Facebook shouldn't be ignored as a potential business network, but metrics should be put in place to determine the value it brings.
- Social Media: Shifting LinkGraph
- In the past, sites received links from blog resources which became a factor in the site's popularity rankings in search. Now, linking has shifted to microblogging such as twitter or other social media platforms. Some folks are stingier about passing links through sites rather than social media. It's interesting to observe how links and information is passed through the web and consider how this can affect search.
- Bing
- Despite the fact that Google is responsible for a large percentage of search, Bing shouldn't be ignored.
- Bing has shown some differences in ranking such as being less sensitive to TLDs (.info, .cc, .net, etc.), and giving more weight to sites with keywords in the domain than other search engines.
- Other
- Personalized search is on the rise. This is something to pay attention to, but hard to measure.
- QDF (query deserves freshness), a search factor related to the freshness of content, has led to search engines indexing content faster. 2010 search strategies recommend becoming a news source to improve search performance.
- Local search is definitely something to be aware of in 2010. Google's Place Rank algorithm is similar to the PageRank algorithm - it looks at specific location or local attributes as a factor in local search.
I found that a trend of the discussion revolved around having good metrics, not just good metrics, but the right metrics such as conversion and engagement. Testing any of the recommendations above (improving your mobile browsing, getting involved in social media, optimizing for Bing) should be measured against conversion to determine the value of the efforts. Also, multivariate or A/B testing were recommended for testing local search optimization and other efforts.
5 comments:
It is very interesting for me to read the post. Thanks the author for it. I like such topics and everything that is connected to this matter. BTW, why don't you change design :).
From an SEO Reseller's point of view, all the trends you've mentioned seems to be pointing to the fact that users are becoming more and more aware about the power of social medias. Advertisers and SEOs have been gunning for social media even more now because of this. It is definitely evident on the rise of both Facebook and Twitter in a short span of time. Bing on the other hand, has shown that it does have a few positives against Google. Maybe their merger with the previous powerhouse Yahoo! would make them a great contender for Google, and possibly be at par in the search engine race. However, Yahoo!-Bing's dominance will not be seen anytime soon, because of certain inconsistencies in their merger deals. We'll just have to wait and see what trends will create a big impact next year.
A great list however I would add another to this; create an IPhone application based around the services on your site!?
Thanks for the info. That's an interesting item about Bing and its more tolerant eye toward TLDs, especially when these can cost so much less. I tend to use .info for my short term marketing efforts, so it's good to know. :)
I'm based in the UK so we are a little behind you from a marketing perspective.
However the social media here is now in full swing, but I feel we still have to wait for the Mobile market to awaken.
One thing I find most frustrating is that many of the marketing tools just don't work well in the UK, so I have to find my own way of getting the information I need.
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