Over the holiday period we have been doing a lot of thinking about what 2010 holds for the internet marketing community.
Here are our thoughts about what is happening, what might happen and what you might do in response.
SEO is not dead
There is so much buzz around the social web, that you could be fogiven for thinking that the most important thing you can do is Tweet 20 times a day. However, the fact remains that for the majority of sites, the majority of traffic will still come from search engines.
Therefore you have to have a solid understanding of all aspects of SEO from site construction to promotion to succeed. That is not to say that the techniques you'll employ are the same as in 08/09. They will not be.
We see the continued swing away from link building and toward creating meaningful content and building meaningful relationships between sites. Thank God.
SERP reports dying
Measuring your position in search engine results pages will increase in irrelevance as search engines use more and more information about our individual surfing habits to give us unique results.
Yes, still track positions, but don't obsess over them. Find a more meaningful metric downstream from the browser, like sales, enquiries and obsess over that.
Live search lives
Google Caffeine heralded some important changes to the way Google works. It promised faster indexing of information from major sites, and it has delivered, with live results from Twitter and the like incorporated into the search page.
This is good, and bad. It's great that we can get instant updates on fast moving events. However, it might herald a return to the bad old days of InfoSeek where to rank top (if only briefly) you just need to be the most recent contributor. This will surely lead to an arms race of automated message posting tools. Very bad.
Conversions, conversions, conversions
Let's remind ourselves why we are here. It's all about the conversion. We love working on conversion optimisation as it brings quick results that deliver great return on investment. Conversion is also very much overlooked by many site owners, yet there are great tools out there, mostly free, to help you out. Start with Google Website Optimiser or speak to us.
Hermits will die
It's clear that the rise and rise of the social web is a game changer. I've always said that one of the most valuable assets in internet marketing is creativity, and the creative will thrive with the new opportunities of the social web, as they create, connect and convert.
Hey, that's not bad...it could be the summary of what 2010 is all about:
Create > Connect > Convert
Writing compelling and persuasive content, promoting via the right networks of influential sites and individuals and influencing people to take specific actions.