With the variety of opinions on the changes in search and the best SEO practices, who are we to trust to ensure our websites are ranking high in the SERPs so we can be found by hungry prospects? How do we know what SEO trends to implement and which ones to ignore?
Below are three SEO trends worth taking note of. If you don’t change with the times, you’re bound to be left behind.
Page-Load Time: One of the 2010 predictions / SEO trends for page-ranking criteria is page-loading time. If your website (or blog) takes seconds to load, you may plummet in SEO rankings. It’s all about speed. I cannot stress this enough. In Google’s mind, there is a huge difference between .15 seconds and .20 seconds to load. According to Google, your site should load in 3 seconds or less.
There are a variety of ways to make your web pages load quicker. One such way is Google’s Page Speed Add-on, which allows you to evaluate the performance of your web page and receive suggestions on ways to improve its load time. When you use Page Speed to evaluate your site performance, you receive scores on how your website functions and ways to make your site load more quickly, keep site visitors engaged, and reduce bandwidth.
Real-Time Search: Both Google and Bing are in the works of pulling up real-time Twitter and Facebook status results in their search engine pages. This dynamic approach to search engine results is shaping the way we communicate and receive news and social updates. Because of this predicted new time-sensitive search, it appears that optimizing tweets, YouTube videos, bookmarked articles, and Facebook posts plays a role in SERP rankings. Collecta is one such search engine that currently pulls up only real-time results. OneRiot and Topsy are two others worth checking out.
Social Media Optimization (SMO): Currently, social media results are limited within large search engines such as Google and Bing, but this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use tags and optimized descriptions and titles in your social media posts, videos, images, and status updates. The SMO strategy enables social media users to look through specific social networks and pull up results based on their search terms. If you utilize SMO practices, your name, posts, videos, links, or images are more likely to pull up in social network search result pages.
For example, if you post a tweet that says, “Web copywriting: 10 things you should know before hiring a copywriter,” you’ll be more likely to pull up in Twitter and Collecta search results under search terms such as “web copywriting” or “copywriter.”
If you like this post, you might also like:
- Changes in Search Mean Changes in Your Company’s Online Behavior
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- Search Evangelist Predicts Search Trends for 2010
