Exciting New Trends in SEO

Search engine optimization is always a changing field. Competition drives evolution, and with the way online marketing has surged ahead in the many pressing concerns of businesses and companies, Search Engine Optimization will only see more growth as the years go by. Saying “the best is yet to come” may be an understatement, but here goes anyway: the best is yet to come!

For a sneak peak of the best and brightest SEO has to offer, here are some exciting new trends (and some already obvious trends starting) you should watch out for in the world of SEO.

The Future of SEO is Social Media

It’s no accident that this year’s Time Magazine’s Person of the Year is Mark Zuckerberg. And no, The Social Network had absolutely nothing to do with Time picking him to be 2010’s Person of the Year. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are the face of the new generation of consumers. The battle for sales leads and conversions will be fought here (and in some other places listed below). Positioning your business to have a strong presence in popular social media sites can only be good in the long run.

Mobile Search

In 2009, mobile users reached 4.6 billion. This year, it easily broke the 5 billion mark and still shows no signs of stopping. The growth of cell phone users worldwide is easily the biggest phenomenon in telecommunication – and marketing. With such a huge market, mobile search is just too big to ignore. Planting your feet (and your firms’ roots) firmly in this fertile ground should be one of your company’s goals – yesterday. If you haven’t done it already, then for the love of all that’s good and profitable, please do optimize your site for mobile devices! Have mercy on those poor mobile users who are missing out on your fantastic website because they couldn’t browse it on their phones. Please.

Going Viral

What do Justin Bieber and SEO have in common? Well, aside from millions of hits, both SEO and Justin Bieber now share the spotlight in YouTube and other popular video sharing sites. Yes! If you haven’t noticed it yet, YouTube just overtook Yahoo! to become the 2^nd largest search engine in the U.S. behind Google. If that isn’t an indication yet of how important it is to have a video of your company uploaded tagged with your target keywords, then we don’t know what is.

Personalized and Local Search

This is just a double whammy of exciting SEO trends currently developing. On the one hand, personalized search favors established websites and makes it harder for new players to break in. On the other hand, local search do help smaller market players beat out bigger competition which may not necessarily have a strong presence in your area. By having a lower number of competitors, you stand a better chance of coming out on top with an aggressive push to be more visible locally. Just make sure your website is hosted in the same country your business is located in to capitalize on the benefits of local search.

Best Practices and Innovation

Meeting the challenges of the years ahead and successfully overcoming them is a combination of continuing the best SEO practices and improving on some of the old. As always, building your brand and managing your reputation continues to be an integral part of SEO. So is maintaining on and off-page optimization. SEO has always been an art between technical finesse and public relations management. Achieving a balance between the two is key in any business’ online success now and in the future.

Top 3 Most Common SEO Mistakes

If there’s one thing you need to know about SEO, it’s this: there are no shortcuts. If Search Engine Optimization is a race, then SEO is a marathon, not a sprint race. Everything about SEO speaks of doing things in the long run. No top-ranked page ever shot to the first page of SERP overnight. And even websites that achieve first page SERP listing need to continuously improve and adapt to the ever growing number of competition. In fact, if you think SEO is just a one-time optimization deal, then you’ve just committed common SEO…

Mistake #1

Optimizing your website once and then leaving it thinking SEO will do the job on its own – even top ranked sites need to continuously add new content and keep abreast of new changes to stay on top of the SERP battle. Staying still means stagnating, and stagnating is never good in an ever changing environment where players are always fighting for the top spot. Aside from providing regular and timely content, you need to continuously check your SEO stats in order to make correct changes and updates to your webpage.

Mistake #2

Perhaps one of the more egregious mistakes SEO newbies make is keyword stuffing. This is the practice of unnecessarily loading keywords in content or in Meta tags. Not only will keyword stuffing not help you in increasing your site’s ranking, it will often get your site blacklisted and consequently banned by search engines. Use your keywords or key phrases sparingly, using it only in the most appropriate places. Use it once in your Meta tags and images tags, and then use it naturally in your content. And don’t try to commit an even worse mistake…

Mistake # 3

Using senseless, grammatically incorrect phrases in your content in the misplaced belief that keywords need to be grouped together in a certain order for it to be crawled by spiders – this practice just screams: WE DON’T VALUE OUR READERS. WE THINK WE’RE SMARTER THAN GOOGLE. Guess what’ll happen next? Your visitors will be turned off by your content and will never come back again, and Google? Well, Google does not necessarily penalize this kind of practice, but they do reward websites that offer relevant information in sync with their tags and keywords by ranking those sites highly. So next time you’re told putting “Affordable Web Design services San Jose California CA” as is in a copy is OK, stop and just fire the guy. Tip: it’s ok to use stop words to separate grammatically incorrect key phrases to make it grammatically correct. In our example above, instead of writing, <company name> offers the most affordable web design services San Jose California CA, write it this way instead: <company name> offers the most affordable web design services in San Jose California, CA. Notice how just the inclusion of the single stop word “in” made our copy infinitely better and grammatically correct too?

Last word

Perhaps the biggest mistake an enterprising webmaster/web owner can make is in neglecting to read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Not only is it’s free, it’s also full of information and quite frankly, the most authoritative SEO guide you’ll ever get.