Season’s Greetings from Orchid Box! So what is 2010 to bring to SEO, Online Marketing

Another year (in fact, another decade….ouch), and another inevitable pile of 2010 lists in all facets of business, entertainment, and life in general. So at Orchid Box we thought we do something different. Then we changed our minds. Cue the fanfares… In the constantly evolving world of Search Engine Optimisation predictions are made every week for the next exciting development to follow. Much as the predictions for the next “Pele” or the next “Beatles” are made every year, a great number of these end up thrown in the bin within a few months, but it’s vital to have an idea of at least the potential areas of growth to keep your competitors a step behind. If you get ahead of the game for one big SEO trend you can boost your business impressively within weeks. Here’s just a few predictions for the coming year…

1. Increased SEO Budgets
Here’s a guarantee for next year – companies will begin taking internet marketing and SEO a lot more seriously as they see the effect it has on business online and their competitors - increasing budgets and departments dealing with SEO and online marketing. Get ahead of the game and you could dominate your markets. This doesn’t just apply for larger companies either – small specialised blog and website packages for one-off optimisation are going to be widely available and cheaply too.

2. 2010 could be the year of Bing
Rather inevitably Google is going to rule the search market over 2010, but we’ll see a bit of a shift over the next few months in terms of percentages. Possibly, and hopefully too for many, Bing will begin taking a bigger share of the market, even in the UK. Bing and Yahoo searches are merging together to form a super unit which will most likely see Bing take at least a 20% of the US market…whether the UK follows suit remains to be seen.
According to Bing the two main indexation guidelines are: 1. Limit all web pages to a reasonable size. Bing recommends covering one topic per webpage. An HTML webpage with no images should be under 150 KB. 2. Keep your website hierarchy fairly flat; that is to say each web page should only
be from one to three clicks away from the default home page.

3. Facebook Advertising and SEO tips
In 2010 Facebook Advertising will continue to grow and this vibrant social network has its own ecosystem that advertisers need to be aware of. According to Cavalletti, in a social network there are people who join to grab information, those who like to distribute material to others, those who want to simply look around and those who want to shape the activity in the group. By watching the discussion threads advertisers can identify the people who tend to serve as mentors for future marketing efforts.
There is no question that the launch of Facebook pages was a watershed for using the site for business, and being able to measure results. SEOs have started to built a number of pages (with tens of thousands of fans) and have learned how Facebook pages and groups are different and similar.
We suggest keeping up to speed on any changes via the Facebook blog, as they will inevitably occur. Hopefully as Facebook grows they’ll make a search quality team ambassador available like Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy to interact and give tips on what to expect, as people will learn to spam these results, and Facebook will have to react, leaving SEOs keen for more information.
Wall-post external content like blog posts and news should be optimized for important keywords, especially the content’s title tag. If possible post your content where the call to action and/or contact information is actually in the title tag. This gets your pitch to the search results as opposed to requiring a second click through to a profile page.

4. All about Localization : Google Local and Twitter location tracking
About 58 million people around the world use Twitter, which accommodates messages of no more than 140 characters. Twitter has now bought Mixer Labs, a startup created by two former Google employees which has developed a location-tracking tool called GeoAPI. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog: "When current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge – everything from breaking news to finding friends or local businesses can be dramatically enhanced. Our efforts in this area have just begun. Today, we're excited to announce a major new step into the location-aware future."

In addition, Google Business Local is now crucial for any PPC or SEO campaign. Local searches have always been a big part of the web – town names, countries and street names alongside a service or company name – and Google Maps is a great way to top search results without having to labour through years of SEO or high PPC cost. It still requires SEO expertise, but is an area that has not been taken over by the big guns just yet.
In 2009 has been the fastest growing area of search and has results served up from multiple sources:
• Search Engines
• Mobile Search (iPhones + BlackBerrys)
• Location Aware Search becoming prominent
• Vertical Platforms (Yellow pages, Allinlondon, Yelp)
We suggest having a consistent presence on every platform and adding all your business locations to Google Business Centre.

5. Conversion Rate/ROI Optimisation
A big area of development over the next year in terms of SEO is conversion rate optimisation – that is to say giving sites increasingly accurate and detailed measurable data for sales, conversions and other such metrics, so clients can push budgets into profitable areas of their site and make changes in others to measure differences in conversions.
In the current economic conditions, CFOs continue to cut the marketing budget and increase demand of productivity, delivering a higher ROI is essential for survival and expansion. At Orchid Box, we are seeing greater investment in conversion optimization and a realization on the part of marketers that this is a business-model changer for their companies that is here to stay.

Orchid Box
Orchid Box are already at the forefront of search engine localisation, mobile advertising, Facebook Advertising and ROI. At Orchid Box we are working on specialised technology in terms of website optimisation and testing, amongst many other things. In both PPC and SEO these data metrics will be vital going into 2010 to ensure you spend to accumulate successfully in the online world!

 

I can't imagine Bing taking 20% of the UK search market next year, it's been stalling ever since Microsoft turned off the big bucks marketing.

 

I can see Bing as taking a larger share, not by much, but I can definitely see it happening.

If Microsoft actually made a web browser that was actually half decent, then that would easily put Bing in contention. One large factor in people not using Bing as much is that iexplore sucks big time, and because Google is default in FireFox, well, you can do the math.