SEO in 2011

SEO in 2011….

What will the major developments be for SEO in 2011? Well 2010 was the year of local search and the advancement of social networking. Many companies and organisations have experimented with Facebook pages and twitter accounts to help stay connected with their customers, enabling them to advertise special discount offers, or update the market on the latest industry developments and news. This trend of business’ creating a social media presence is only likely to continue into 2011.

Social Media Marketing

SEO in 2011 will involve the integration of social media into search engine results pages. Google and Bing have already announced that Facebook and twitter updates have already been introduced into their algorithms and will contribute to organic rankings. Facebook and twitter updates are almost certainly going to be a regular feature in search engine results pages.

The online marketing budget for companies in 2011 will most likely have a larger proportion dedicated to social media marketing.

How can social media play a part in helping websites rank well in search engines?

Many of us in the SEO community have tried to predict potential signals which may have an influence on how search engines construct their algorithms to incorporate social media into the SERPS.

• Engagement level – A webpage or blog post publicised on social media websites could be assigned authority by search engines if the page receives a large quantity of tweets/retweets or Facebook likes. A larger amount of tweets and Facebook likes can be used by search engines as a sign of a webpages importance and relevancy, the more times a page is liked, the more important the information is to visitors.

• Friends/Followers – Twitter accounts may be assigned authority based on the ratio of friends to followers. If an account has hundreds of followers, but is only following a small amount of people, this account may be regarded as highly authoritative. Search engines could regard this account as a market leader due to the sheer amount of people interested in following it.

• Authority of followers – A twitter account could benefit from additional trust and influence if their own followers have high authority. A follower’s trust could be passed on to other twitter accounts.

Integrating more social media into the organic listings will hopefully help reduce spam and poor content from the SERPs. Facebook pages and twitter accounts will only be followed if they promote websites that contain useful helpful information.

Mobile SEO

Another huge development for SEO in 2011 is likely to involve mobile SEO. An increasing amount of searches are now carried out on smart phones and websites now need to be optimised for mobile search.

How will mobile websites be optimised for SEO? How will search engine algorithms assign authority to mobile websites? In my opinion I don’t think backlinking will be a suitable method for optimising mobile websites.

It is unlikely mobile websites will link to mobile websites. Mobile websites need to be as simplistic as possible. This would mean reducing the amount of highly optimised content displayed on a page. Would this have an effect on the way search engines crawl a mobile site? Content is king in SEO, but if the level of content on a mobile website is reduced this could have an effect on how search engine spiders crawl a page.

SEO in 2011 will have many interesting developments and surprises. We look forward to welcoming the New Year and tackling the many changes SEO and Internet marketing will bring.