Search Engine Optimization is an ever-changing landscape. Search Engines are constantly revising their algorithm formulas to stay ahead of those practicing black hat SEO tricks and to keep pace with the latest technology and services.
As we start a New Year, let’s look at recent trends in the world of SEO and what SEO professionals are predicting for 2010.
Does your page load quickly?
Google is making page load time a ranking factor in 2010 because pages that load quickly improve the user experience. In light of this, Google has announced a new feature in Google Webmaster Tools; Site performance. Site performance is an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you the average page load time for pages in your site, the trend over the last few months, and some suggestions on how to make your pages load faster. Page load time is the total time from the moment the user clicks on a link to your page until the time the entire page is loaded and displayed in a browser. It is collected directly from users who have installed the Google Toolbar and have enabled the optional PageRank feature. To check this out, go to the Dashboard for your site in Google Webmaster Tools, in the left column expand +Labs -> Site performance. The Labs area of Webmaster Tools allows you to try out experimental new features in Webmaster Tools. Google is test driving these new features and hoping for user feedback.- Link Diversity
Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz explains the significance of Link Diversity in the video below. Everyone in the SEO world is familiar with the importance of external links coming into your site, but the raw link count – the number of links coming into your site or page, may not be indicative of things. This reasons for this may be obvious, like some of those links are followed or no followed but there is another important thing to realize… the diversity of different domains that point to a page or given site. - Social Media Links –
It was just a matter of time before search engineers developed a way to incorporate linking from micro-blogging sites into the search algorithm. Google couldn’t continue to ignore the relevance of traffic from micro-blog sites so they developed Real Time Search. Real Time Search is where in real time, news, microblogs and social media status are posted in SERP snippets. To view Real Time Search results a user needs to click the + Show options… to open the results and adjust the results filters.
What do you think about these trends? Please leave a comment.
Hey, thanks so much for posting this original and unique article. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve visited blogs from Google and they’ve got nothing on them but crappy ads and false information that’s unereliable. I don’t normally comment on blogs, but I just thought that i’d drop you a line and tell you that I think you’re doing a fantastic job. Thanks! if you want, you can check out my blog at Stihl Chainsaws
I hope that you plan on blogging about the impact of these new trends. Much of the future on the web is about really getting “social” – going beyond your own site and into the blogosphere…
Thank you so much for this list, it really helps me out!
Thank you so much for this list, it really helps me out!
Good points, I think the importance of link diversity can’t be stressed enough. This post will prove to be useful to anyone who is looking for a little SEO guidance this year. I similarly found this other post very helpful, you can check it out here. http://blog.directorymaximizer.com/2010/01/28/7-seo-predictions-for-2010/