Merry Christmas to all 3 of you who read my blog. I hope you all enjoy what I’m sure is a well deserved break, a Merry Christmas if you celebrate Christmas as I do and have a blessed new year.
Now, where would we be without forecasts for the new year and what might arise. As any good SEO would I turned to Google rather than think for myself and looked at the first result for search predictions 2009. Who knew Craig & Janes world predictions for 2009 would be #1. From them amongst other things including Victoria Beckham getting pregnant and many top companies going bust, there was nothing related to search other than what Im sure will be searches, if nothing else.
Moving further up the tree I found some digital marketing predictions. Some interesting takes on this included:
- Twitter providing unprecedented access to corporate personnel
- Listening programs through social media to “feel the pulse”
- Having less but more meaningful digital friends (quality v quantity)
- That social networks will be leveraged with the current budget squeeze
OK, enough nonsense, maybe lets try the proverbial horses mouth, Mr Cutts from Google himself. He reckons in 2009:
- Pay less attention to ranking
- Universal search will continue to expand
- That there will be improved indexing of engagement objects, specifically video
As Bruce Clay has also reiterated, analytics will become increasingly important, and after all, has always been the true measure of success. Is your traffic going up? And of course lets see what the shiny new Google spider brings forth in the new year when engagement objects become more integrated with the ranking algorithms.
Don’t brace yourself though, from past experience Google Australia is highly cautious with search results and messing with the formula. If the roll out of Universal search is anything to go by, this could take awhile.
So my 5 cents…..
I dug deep and thought about where search might well be heading in the future rather than just 2009. Firstly keep in mind in society and behavioral change happens slowly and the cycle of early adopters through to what becomes the norm is usually driven by the things that guide most of our life. Fashion and/ or necessity. So things changes that are happening slowly include:
- Gaming, video, online or other is growing, this is the first step toward the blur of the virtual and online world and increasingly younger people might find it hard to discern between real life rules and protocol and those allowed online, in their virtual world. The hours spent playing games may also be longer than spent socialising with real people.
- As this blur continues to grow the acceptance and usage of online devices, to “stay connected” at all times increases. While I believe this is still clunky and driven mainly by social networking sites and micro blogging websites the trend is there, and the early adopters are very busy. From experience, some people already believe their online social audience is different to their real life offline interactions and are often surprised when one meets the other.
- Search engines will need to learn how to bridge this gap of real life versus virtual requirements, with search “on the fly”.
- This brings me to my next point, which is already in play, that the interactions or channels to search will expand, with verbal search and maybe even automated queries from software under your control, searching to build solutions.
- Search engines will need to ready themselves for numerous queries from numerous channels and some automated.
- Optimisation will become even more complex, with optimisation potentially being focused on the user type and user attributes
- There will always be leaders and laggards and thus opportunity.
Merry Christmas and best wishes to all of my readers for 2009. I look forward to more consistent and intelligent blogging in the new year.
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