This will be my last post of 2009 on SEO. I am currently finishing off the training material for my new SEO training course which starts on the 5th of Jan – this one is full, but there are still some places for the next training day on the 20th Jan.
These are a few of my predictions for 2010.
Yahoo! are stopping using their own search results during 2010. This will be the biggest SEO shake up next year. All the public facing free tools use the Yahoo! API for their results, this will stop. I hope that this will kill off some of the low level competition in the market, as there are too many companies saying they are able to do things that they can’t.
During 2009 the demand for SEO services increased substantially. I expect this growth to continue throughout 2010. Companies that are using search engine optimisation to target the export market and companies selling products within Ireland are both doing very well using SEO. However the results for the service industry, especially consultants of various types, has not been so good – perhaps that is just down to the current economic conditions.
I expect Google Wave to be the next big thing in the social web, if they roll it out to everyone – as it is still invite only. Facebook watch out.
I expect it to be harder to get links, and much harder to get good links that count. More money will have to be on the table to promote sites.
A few big news sites will stop being listed on Google and will only be available on Bing, (MSN’s new search engine), and I am sure at least one will go behind a pay wall. I will be happy to see them out of Google as sites like the Irish Times and Independent are using SEO to the users determent – more on than in another post.
More SEO consultants will leave the SEO services area. I have seen at least two Irish SEO experts in the field cut down dramatically on client work this year. This is a simply profit issue, if you build your own web sites and sell a product or adverts it reaches a point where this is more profitable than client work, however it takes long hours building both to get there.
How I Got Here
Next month marks the end of my fourth year in the SEO arena, it has been quite a journey. I started by building a web site on the Camino de Santiago which I had just walked, (all 780km and more), and discovered SEO. Once my first web site went live very few people visited it and I started to explore why Google hated my site.
The content on my site was, I thought, much better than many others that were listed in front of my great site! This does not matter to Google or other search engines, what I needed at that time was links. So I went and asked everyone in the same space if they would list my website – many did. Then I went everywhere I could to get my site listed. By the end of 2006 the site was at number one in Google in the UK. Later it went to number one in all English speaking countries. I was hooked.
Because I love hill walking so much I went and built a few web sites about hill walking in different countries. It was all good experience, but that area does not pay well from advertising. So I built a few finance websites just around the time I started offering SEO services about 2/3 years back. I had expected 2009 to be a bumper year for adverts – then along came a recession. My websites doubled in traffic as expected, but the ad revenue increased only by about 20%. That’s life. So I have been using my strong Euro during 2009 to outsource content production to the US and the UK, right now is about investing for the future and keeping on building.
My last prediction for 2010 is that most Irish businesses will know what SEO is during next year and train someone in-house to look after this necessary part of their their marketing mix.
There is never enough time…
Have a great Christmas and growth in 2010.
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