i think you should ask matt cutts.. he is a real person.. and he give you information about seo 2010, 2011 to 2050
I think social bookmarking has replaced directories in last 2 years for quick index linking. Probably has devalued with Google, though. In the end it is still about good content, keyword rich sites and anchor text driven outbound links from quality and related competing sites.
I think Google has put some rules on long-tail keywords, lots of sites experienced ranking drops after mayday update, also Yahoo organic results Switch To Bing. Those are some special things happened in 2010.
I saw that none of the responses here have mentioned site speed as a ranking factor. Search engines are most concerned with providing quality content to its *users* - the speed (usabilitity) of your site is now considered as part of Google's algorithm, and most likely other SEs as well. I wrote an article about changes to SEO this year, and what will be happening next based on a conference I attended - might give you some ideas (it is a little long though, caution for those like bullet points) http://blog.9thsphere.com/blog/future-of-internet-marketing regards, -e
Quality site and content is important to make your visitor comfortable beside u have to do SEO and linkbuilding...
I think, my friends are talking about what is new in SEO field in 2010. I am working last 2 years in seo field but i get nothing new thing in two years.
This has been a big year for SEO additions. Googles implementation of Caffeine which incorporates popular twitter tweets as part of its search algorithm is a big game changer for driving traffic and for ranking high and fast in the serps. I also like Googles providing query predictions in the search box, I got some great hints there for long tailed keywords.
based on my experience i could say that there was a little changes on seo this year. I`m an seo freelancer for more than 3 years and because of my experience i could notice some changes. For example the last year if you waned to rank high for a certain keyword then your first step was to create sites using web 2.0 properties. For example your main site will be site A . And you have 20 aditional free sites (site B, C, D and so on) that will link back to site A . Using this algorithm your site was on the top position for your keyword (considering you have choose a keyword with less competition). Even if the changes i was talking here where on the last months of 2009 i have personally seen that from 2010 Google has really count them. With the new changes to rank site A you will need the following : Site B link to Site C that link to site A Site C link to site D that link to site B and also to site A and so on. Practically you most create a network of interlinked sites and all those sites have one thing in common : they all link back to your site but because of this linking structure you will get more seo power
I think providing good content, video, media. Old established and active sites will be more welcome too!
If you want to find out what is new in SEO in 2010, I suggest you to view all videos posted in 2010 at http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp and view all new blog post posted on http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/