subject: The State Of The Internet Marketing Nation - 2010 Update [print this page] Search engine optimization is perhaps one of the most rapidly changing industries across the globe. Where lawnmowing, hairdressing and in-store sales have remained much the same over the past fifty years, internet marketing and search engine ranking optimization have been invented, developed guidelines, seen those guidelines thrown out and recreated more than once in a short ten year period.
It's essential that internet marketing services and web marketing strategy is performed within the parameters of the latest known information; today we update the state of the internet marketing industry for mid-2010.
Mobile search
Mobile search statistics continue to confirm the correctness of the impressive expectations for the platform. The release of the Microsoft's Bing search engine as an option for iPhones means that the Bing algorithm could well become more important in mobile search engine ranking optimization efforts.
Social media optimization
We continue to hear about the few companies with highly publicized, very impressive social media success stories online ... yet the vast majority of businesses that try social media as an internet marketing adjunct often see minimal returns. Still, most search engine optimization experts see social media as a worthwhile activity for marketers, if used in a very specific way and for a specific subset of businesses. Given that Facebook recorded more visits than Google in March 2010, the platforms importance to business is undeniable.
Personalized search
There was a lot of fear and misunderstanding about the impact of personalized search in Google earlier in the year. Extensive testing seems to have determined that the main danger of personalization is in people connected with a company basing decisions on their personalized results, rather than the results that their searchers see.
Link weighting
The focus on relevant, quality links has actually continued to be an important internet marketing factor for many companies throughout 2010. The attention of major search engines to using not only the number of inbound links, but also their quality, means that companies that go for quality tactics over trying to 'trick' search engines or leverage the system will benefit.
Google Updates
The release of Google Caffeine as a fully functional service means that Google is discovering and indexing content much faster across the web, despite the fact that the amount of information contained across the internet would take more than 57,000 years to read (non-stop). Google Caffeine means that websites with fresher content are spidered and indexed more often, and so hold more search engine optimization effort.
Google's Mayday update (released in May, incidentally), is an algorithmic change at Google directed at ranking higher quality sites better for long tail queries in the results. For webmasters, this means that long-tail queries on high quality sites should see better search engine optimization results.
Page speed has been a factor in Google's ranking algorithm since January, albeit a small one. Like many Google updates that affect web marketing strategy, this is geared at improving searcher experience on the web. If you pay attention to what customers want in your internet marketing, you can be fairly well guaranteed that Google (and the other search engines also) will eventually recognize this.
Search engine optimization continues to be a game where those that stay abreast of trends also succeed in business. It is vital that you engage an internet marketing company that pays attention to the latest methodologies ... or risk wasting both time and money.
