Here are some new considerations to drive your SEO success in 2010.
What follows is a little information on some key factors. Over the next month or so I’ll send specific lessons and guidelines on what to do in these areas – for now I would just like to flag up for you what they are….
SITE SPEED
Google has publicly stated that it wants to make the web faster. Its gone so far as to offer a range of tools you can use to check the speed of your site.
Although not specifically stated by Google, most people in the SEO world expect that site speed will increasingly be considered as a ranking factor as we move into 2010.
Here’s a link to the tools and more information from Google – How Fast is Your Site
If you dont perform too well you’ll need to consider re-hosting and/or a whole range of other ‘code’ related issues to increase the speed. Hopefully though the tools will deliver good news for you.
PERSONALISATION
If you spend as much time looking at rankings as I do you will probably have noticed that rankings can be different for different people and different times. Initially Google only showed different results if you were ‘signed in’ to your Google account, nowadays it doesnt matter if you are signed in, they monitor your surfing/clicking behaviour and tailor rankings accordingly.
Fortunately there isnt too much variance – maybe you see your site at position 3 and I see at at position 5, but what does this mean to SEO?
As far as we are concerned, although rankings are still important, a more important metric for measuring your success is through analytics. Specifically, given that different people see different rankings, its the visits to your site which you need to measure as the ultimate success metric.
SOCIAL MEDIA
In this area I plan to provide much more detail on what you can do in to enhance your online marketing and SEO success. At the moment I’ll just mention a couple of things…
– If you are not already engaging in social media you should give it serious consideration. As well as driving traffic directly to you – videos on YouTube, your Facebook presence, LinkedIn etc – activity on social media relating to your site is increasingly used by search engines as a signal for ranking purposes. Simple example – your site/products are mentioned a number of times on the Facebook community – Google will pick up on this and reflect it in rankings higher rankings.
-In addition of course is the ‘link equity’ you could gain through some of the social media sites. (notwithstanding ‘no follow’ usage by some major sites)
I will post specific lessons on what you can do here over the next couple of months so dont worry too much about the specifics yet – althgough you may want to do some preliminary research
REAL TIME SEARCH
…Is something that Twitter does and Google doesnt. For example Michael Jacksons demise was flagged on Twitter within hours of it happening. Recent earthquake activity in California was reported on Twitter within minutes of the event. Google is always out of date – typically 2-3 weeks for most small businesses – since that’s how often Googlebot returns on average.
Of course both Google and Bing have now done deals with Twitter to include tweets in the search engine ranking results. So if you tweet about something relevant keyphrase searches will throw up the tweet. Here’s an indication of how important Google regards Twitter – you can see in a search for ‘Jan Klin’ my Twitter presence is second only to my own web site presence…
Again, more specifics on what you can do later – meanwhile you may want to do some research on Twellow (Twitter’s directory) to see the activity in your industry or sector.
UNIVERSAL SEARCH AND DIGITAL ASSETS OPTIMISATION (DAO)
Another 3 word acronym folks which may or may not get integrated into the search marketing lexicon. DAO of course suggests that nowadays people are increasingly concerned about getting their videos, images, blogs, tweets, etc optimised and ranked on Google as well as their website.
Because of Google Universal Search (scroll past the interview) – you have the opportunity of getting multiple sources in the search results, or, different sources at different times depending on what people search for. You have to make sure you optimise your digital assets though and submit to the relevant indexes – there’s a really good summary of some of the more important things to do here
There will be new things no doubt as the year progresses, but as of right now it seems these will be to most significant – so, lessons and guides on the detail coming soon….
