As you may have heard, the American Dialect Society recently announced their 2009 Word of the Year, as well as their Word of the Decade. Not surprisingly, “Tweet” was selected as Word of the Year. Even less surprising was the Word of the Decade. Beating out such nominees as “9/11”, “green”, “the war on terror”, and “blog”, the word for the first decade of the new millennium was “Google”.
Both winners serve as inarguable proof that we are truly living in a digital era. Maybe you don’t have to tweet, but if you aren’t focusing on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to improve your website’s search visibility, you may be damaging the growth of your business.
High search rankings aren’t easy to achieve, and the challenge is increasing as more and more businesses engage in SEO. Adding to that challenge is the continual evolution of the SEO landscape. If you are actively optimizing your website for search (or not), what are some of the important changes you can expect to see in SEO for 2010?
Page Speed
Google recently announced that they will begin using Page Load Speed as part of their ranking algorithm for organic (natural) search. The size of the web is creating massive scalability issues, and slow sites take Google and other search engines longer to index. Although fast-loading pages have always enjoyed advantages in search and usability, the importance of speed will become far more pronounced this year.
Page Speed is influenced by a number of factors – the speed of your web server, the number of HTTP requests required to render the page, the file size of your images, the amount of code clutter, etc. If you’d like to check the load speed of your pages, both Google and Yahoo offer free tools to do that.
Personalization
We are seeing increased growth in the personalization of search results. In other words, the listings you pull up for a search query may be different from the listings I pull up with the exact same search query. This is because your previous search history influences your next set of search results. The implication here is that you need to have a larger footprint across the web. In other words, optimize for variations on your keyword phrases and be found in multiple sources, including social media.
Localization
Localization is also growing in importance. If you operate locally, you must optimize for the search results in your geographical area. Make sure you are listed in the local results in Google Maps (www.google.com/local/) and other search engines.
Of course, search engines change their ranking algorithms on an on-going basis, and many smaller changes are implemented regularly. So, as always, don’t forget the basic tenets of optimizing your site for search:
- Create ample, relevant content for your visitors
- Update or add to your content regularly
- Promote your site through high-quality, relevant inbound links from other sites
If you want to convert more prospects into leads and generate more business, the first step is to attract visitors to your website. The rewards of SEO will more than justify the effort.
Tammy Hartweg
Spritz Web Solutions
www.spritzweb.com
