SEO has always been a serious business, it is, after all, the means through which a website ranks on the search engine pages and can get on Google’s first page (which is, really, the only search engine which really matters).
As the web has become larger and more intricate and websites get more complex in terms of navigation, structure and programming, search engine optimisation has become critical. While even a couple of years ago SEO was what you bought in from outside when things with your online business was not going well, now it has to be an integral part of everything you plan to do online otherwise there is little logic in starting anything as its chance of success will be slim at best.
In today’s online world SEO is a major consideration when a website is being built and it is an integral part of a website’s operation in regards of internal links, internal link anchor text, page titles, content and keywords employed. Throughout 2010 there were major SEO trends which began making themselves felt and which have culminated in social marketing and a website’s presence in Twitter and Facebook as metrics which now are used by Google to appraise its ranking.
The fact that so many websites use Facebook and Twitter as an additional layer of online marketing means that a simple ‘presence’ there will no longer be enough. It stands to reason that if everyone has a presence then the metric has to go deeper in order to help differentiate one website from another. For instance the number of Tweets and the number of times a website is mentioned on Facebook or its content is ‘Liked’ are going to play a vital part in SEO. Because social marketing is all about engaging your audience it makes perfect sense to say that the websites which will do well in terms of SEO in 2011 are the ones which have in place a carefully worked out, implementable, social media marketing strategy which takes into account the arrival of the real-time web and which delivers content across many platforms in an efficient way which minimises effort and maximises impact.
The year ahead will see many changes in SEO and online promotion. Those websites which fail to heed the message will face an inevitable obscurity which will reduce their visitor numbers, online visibility and traffic to the point where they will fail irrespective of their quality. Until now the web has been a place of exponential growth. This is the first year of a period where an online shake-up will begin with those who deserve to survive, doing so and increasing their presence and online success while those who are unwilling to put in the effort and energy falling further and further behind.
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I’ve led the discussion on how social media and SEO are changing the processes we use to work and live, online, with the publication of my book ‘The Social Media Mind’. I combine experience in journalism and blue-chip corporate management with a penchant for explaining complex issues in simple terms. Contact me for media interviews, presentations and panel discussions
