SEO Trends and Strategies - 2010
- 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.
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