Here are my top SEO predictions for 2009

1. Good Content will rule – Due to the proliferation of websites and blogs, there is going to be an increasing need to differentiate your content. Viral Content which people will blog about will help the most.

2. Social media marketing is here to stay. It is now an integral part of SEO and Companies should consider what social media channels will help them. Many companies think this means setting up their own blog – but more relevant will be how they can market on social media sites. Social shopping sites will be big where people purchase based on reviews from others who they know. Just have a look at the global traffic to facebook compared to other mainstream sites…according to Google Trends…

3. Using blogs for seo purposes has become big in 2008 and software like SENUKE can be used to spin new content and post it on multiple different social media sites. If this strategy is replicated it is possible to have hundreds of posts on social media sites pointing back to your website.

This proliferation of blog pages, means that unique content will become more valuable. Google can assess the uniqueness of chunks of content on a page in determing whether it is duplicate content – Maybe the uniqueness of a complete site can be determined and become a factor in ranking for pages on that site?

Because of the importance of SEO in managing website content, WordPress (and similar platforms like b2evo which powers this blog) will be recommended as the web design software of choice for creating standard websites. This is because there are so many free templates available, so many plugins, and because SEO plugins ensure every page is pretty much SEO optimized when the content is published, not to mention the ease of content management.

4. Domain name with keywords – Having good keywords in the main domain name seems to have increased in importance for search ranking on Google and I have actually seen this happening during 2008 not only on Yahoo and MSN. This may be good for informational sites however it may not be so good for branding. For example would you purchase from a site called bestcomputer.com or dell.com? In competitive markets, social media will overpower the domain name effect on ranking.

5. Video Content. Internet marketers have grasped onto this big time in the last half of 2008 and I think this will move into mainstream business in a big way in 2009. A video can get the message across directly to the customer, and save them time reading around the site for relevant information.

Automated tools like Traffic Geyser can help businesses boost their video content to the top of Google. By tagging your videos with the right search terms you can influence the search results so that it can be found for your important search terms.

Since video search is still largely based on the keywords used to title and tag the video, the number of visits is going to be important in ranking. As Google owns YouTube they have all the information they need about number of page views, time spent watching the video, etc… Tools like Traffic Geyser will therefore continue to give first page rankings on Google.

Although universal search has allowed Google to blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search on the same results page, these blended results will lead to questions about which are most relevant. In my opinion the ideal results page should have a list of standard search results, and a separate list of video results, all on the same page without having to click another tab.

I welcome your comments and additions below…