SEO: The New Rules for 2009

The world of search is under heavy transformation and 2009 will positively be bringing new surprises, features and new search tools. What appears is the fact that search engines such as Google, are going to increasingly value your choices and clicks as a reference value to serve relevant results for your queries.

SEO gurus made some predictions about the changes they expect from Google in 2009.
Content will still be the king. Always provide fresh and unique contents. Meta tags and targeted keywords are not that important anymore. A well-searched keyword is the one that matters. Relevance of the content is the main factor for Google to value your post. Serving the needs of your readers should always be the number one thing in your mind. It is the relevance and quality of the content associated with the searching habits of the reader that Google would be looking for. Incoming back links with high values will still help.

Content will still be the predominant factor for the worthiness of a site, but that the other media like video and pod cast will become more important as Google sees how searchers request for it. Along with text, video is already making way with universal search results. Therefore, now is the opportunity to optimize rich media contents for fast results. Videos placed in You Tube ranked within days in Google. Google is now giving more importance to videos and that it is getting better at Flash. Moving pictures are the most powerful tool for quickly communicating a sophisticated array of ideas and emotions. Therefore, video optimization will be a big push in 2009.

Due to world financial crisis, many companies are forced to decrease the expenses on advertising and on SEO.

The new rules for 2009-

Unique content will rule definitely
Web 2.0 is not a trend anymore since almost all new sites support web 2.0 paradigm.
Blogging and microblogging will get more attention
Video and conversational social marketing i.e., forums and social communities will be among the most effective ways to keep your content visible inside major search engine result pages. Therefore, if you want to create a niche among your competitors, your presence must be solid and well spread across diverse media outlets.

Marketing tactics/techniques to adopt in 2009

Identify your most valuable customers and determine what attracts them. Once you begin to focus more effort on quality visitors, you will discover that certain keywords and key phrases drive high conversions/visits. Increase your bids for those keywords and optimize your ad copy and landing pages to generate even more conversions. Be sure to look at all the terms people enter into the search box. Search engines will provide the searchers a new set of results based on his history of searching and browsing habits. Google will look into IP Address, use geo-targeting and remember which websites one frequently visits.

Your web analytics tool can easily identify your top five visiting countries, visiting states, visiting cities and so on. By knowing where most of your visits are coming from, you can optimize your campaigns to those territories.

A simple change/update of the listing’s description can improve the CTR phenomenally.

The challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, rather pay attention to traffic, conversions and keep building good content.