Google will keep SEOers busy in 2008

Posted on | January 2, 2008 |

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For those of us who live and breathe Google search results, the second half of 2007 was a tough one as Google seemingly kept experimenting and altering their algorithm weekly, with their interest in displaying fresher results. As a result, there was a great deal of movement around the rankings and blogs had a lot to do with it. We’ve been pushing clients extra hard to get a blog which have become a standard addition to any website or marketing campaign. SEO will continue to be tough this year. Many have had the strategy of doing the optimization, seeing rankings increase and then sitting back and letting it play out. While we do have clients who want this kind of service, we encourage them not to rest on these as search has become a whole lot more than that. RSS is also starting to play a bigger part in results, particularly for niche subjects with many adopting home pages like iGoogle and adding favorite feeds to it. This form of customization is what users are wanting and where RSS will finally become mainstream.

This is all very exciting stuff but it does require that a business model like ours (which is centred around SEO) needs to evolve. With such a greater need for hands-on work in addition to research and strategy, an emphasis needs to be placed on streamlining if we are to keep it affordable particularly for small business who don’t have the funds to compete against some of the corporate entities.

For us, it’s always been about expanding your web footprint and there continues to be new and exciting ways to do it. Right now, we encourage clients to at least stick to the basics.
- A well-optimized website design
- At least basic SEO (keyword strategy, content, title tags, headers, linking strategy)
- A blog
- Write and submit articles
- Product or service videos, optimized and distributed
- Write and distribute optimized press releases
- Email Marketing Campaign

Then if there is a little more in the budget, a Paid Search campaign, more aggressive of the above, possibly a TV show or viral video, a social campaign (myspace, facebook, YouTube and whatever social niche you are in), get on twitter, pownce or other microblogging system, blog marketing (not just a blog people), microsites…just to name a few.

Some other SEO thoughts for the year:

We spent quite a bit of time encouraging clients to look at their landing pages particularly for PPC campaigns but few took us up on it due to the costs associated with it. Split testing, content targeting for landing pages can really boost conversions for many campaigns so try to make this a priority for ‘08.

Personalized search will continue to make life difficult for SEOers as clients will wonder where their rankings go from day to day.

Google’s universal search is still around but there appears to be less emphasis on it. I can’t see it going away, will most likely evolve, possibly adopting a layout similar to that of Ask.com where the right column contains images and videos (in addition to their ads) rather than the main search area.

Social Google will take some big strides this year. Their announcement of social experiment “Knol” was a hint of this where a community controls content much like Wikipedia or Digg.

I can’t see mobile getting their act together this year, especially in the US. Just make sure your site is compatible.

And finally, one of the more ‘out there’ predictions I spoke of on the tech show is that Google will be giving away computers, especially to third world countries, possibly in conjunction with the One Laptop per Child initiative which seems to be struggling. We’ll see.

2008 will be an interesting year for Internet Marketers (aren’t they all).