SEO in 2009 – New Trends & Happenings

2009 has passed by & incomes 2010. The apparent custom in the Online media is to push mostly useless year in review top ten lists at the world, which is why we should be no different. So here are the “Top Ten SEO Developments of 2009”

10. Small Business Websites Trying SEO Increased rapidly

The economy sucked big time. Small business websites started to look at Internet as a major source of income. Soon small business realized that one of the best ways to fight the economy is to not lag behind in the Internet marketing.

9. Google’s Rankings importance reduced over the year

Bruce Clay went a bit far by saying rankings are dead. They’re maimed for sure, but definitely still alive.

But rankings are not the only thing that matter. They are, at most, a means to an end. And with personalized search, rankings became harder and harder to consistently track. Instead, it became important to track:

• Traffic from organic search.
• Keywords that are generating traffic. Are they or non-branded?
• Bounce rate from organic search visits. How many visitors from organic search look at one page and leave without clicking to another page? The more folks that leave, the higher your bounce rate. A high bounce rate is bad.

8. Yahoo! claims to have stopped supporting the keyword meta tag, even though it apparently still does.

The internet & the internet users are old enough to see things like meta tags come and go. Probably not so weird to some of you young people out there, but to a thirty something who learned HTML in PICO and Elm by raiding page sources before there was any such thing as an editor, it’s somewhat startling to think about it.

7. Google announces that rel=nofollow no longer works for PageRank sculpting, even though it apparently still does.

Yes, that is the pattern all SEO people can see. That the search engines, whose job it is to hide the magic formula from us might mislead us is disappointing, but not surprising. It certainly throws us all off the scent, at least for awhile.

6. BING launched in July 2009

BING was launched by Microsoft in July, 09. It started with a share of 0.4 % but achieved a market share of 9.4 % at the end of the same month. Due to this, Google’s market share dropped down by 1 % to 64.6 %, while Yahoo remained unchanged.

5. Real-time search gets more weight-age

When MJ died suddenly in June, the fact is that he brought the entire internet to a screeching halt as an entire planet full of people dropped whatever they were doing to read and talk about it online. It resulted in Twitter collapsing, which Google thought was under a denial of service attack. The news results available were clearly not up to date. And Jeff Goldblum was collateral damage as rumors of his untimely demise ran unchecked since the search engines. Jeff got the last laugh when he appeared on the Colbert Report to takeoff his own death rumors and Google and Bing got down hard to get real-time search live. Unfortunately, real time search is sorely easy to manipulate, as Natalie Portman can likely testify. With or without real time search, celebrity death rumors will always find their way to the mainstream.

4. Google Caffeine – SEO’s worldwide waiting to see for the difference

Seriously, this is the SEO equivalent of being stuck circling across a runaway, since there isn’t a runway available for you in Chicago. Fact is, Caffeine will likely be a very good update, and we’re all probably hyperventilating over a bunch of nothing. But let’s simply admit it – the SEO community thrives on its own panic. If it wasn’t Caffeine, it would be something else, like the recent updates to Google’s personalized search methodology.

3. Personalized search breaks the traditional SEO ranking metrics.

Rankings have been the conventional metric on which to base your invoicing, but they’re really just a proxy for conversions. Conversions are the entire point. If you’re a wearing a Blue shirt in Spencers, and people in Spencers are seeking Blue shirt, Google is MORE likely to list you in its search result because it’s working to deliver results that are relevant to both the subject and the searcher’s location. Ultimately, this represents a true benefit to the client. If I’m optimizing my Spencers client’s site from my office in Mumbai, your search results are not going to be what the Spencers searcher sees, the results are probably better. Therefore, the client benefits.

2. Social media, the growth & recognition

When it concerns to Social media, it’s the overall consensus that 2009 constituted of social media’s breaking through party. The question has developed from “What is Twitter?” to “How are you using Twitter?” Even your Mom must have got a Facebook account and harasses you each day about when you’re going to get around to posting the latest photographs of your graduation. How do you recognise when a technology has really arrived? Simple, when your Mom has it & can actually use it.

1. Real-Time Search went LIVE with Google & Bing

Google and Bing have embarked on introducing an arena that constitutes a key change in the Search Engine space. Real-time search will probably form a lot of what people expect 2010. Companies that sat with the sidelines attempting to solve their Twitter scheme instantly to bring this conversation to the forefront.

Google and Bing now provide fantastic distribution for Twitter, and people who held no concept of Twitter will instantly be uncovered. With Facebook bringing in user status updates to real-time search, the service will exclusive grow more robust. Marketers will have to rethink organic rankings to accommodate these raw scrolling listings, as they may cast off eye tracking tougher than universal results already do.

Some steps that Search Engine Experts practiced in 2009

• Created ideas that can spread & encourage users to spread them (SMM activities)
• Understanding the viral marketing importance of your category
• Build a presence on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter
• Encourage your users to bookmark your sites in browsers & on web services
• Use of buttons / clicks to let users share by email
• Increase the number of RSS users
• Build links from socials sites, forget about nofollow

Tweet This Post

Tags: 2009 SEO, new trends in SEO, SEO - Search Engine Optimization, SEO 2009