SEO Consult Blog

It’s easy to get caught up in how a page is ranking and whether it’s doing better today than it was a month or six months ago. But search engine algorithms are in a state of near perpetual evolution and so it’s vital that you also concentrate time and effort on following trends and determining how a page is likely to perform in the future and what can be done now to improve those future results. There are many factors to consider and the most efficient SEO will look at historical data, patent applications, major search updates, and many other sources of information.

Search Engine Market Share

One trend that has remained constant for sometime is the domination of the search market that Google has over all of its competitors. In the UK, we use the google.co.uk and google.com search engines for around 75% of all searches we conduct, and rather than making any ground, the other two major search engines (Yahoo and MSN) have recently seen the lead broaden.

Topically Relevant Keywords

Other more recent but vital changes have included the reliance on topically related keywords. Google and Yahoo in particular employ a degree of semantic indexing when crawling and ranking pages. This means that as well as considering the primary keywords on a page, they will also look for supporting keywords. Google takes this a step further and considers semantically related keywords when judging the prowess of your link profile.

Universal Search

Universal search is another big step. Search engine results no longer display just a list of the 10 or 15 most popular pages based solely on textual content. Video results, news results, blog results, and image results are now displayed too. This method of universal search has opened new doors for the site that is willing to broaden and expand its SEO efforts into optimising all the content on a page.

The Social Internet

Social media and social networking have, to an extent, become the new search. Many people log on daily to use social sites like MySpace, YouTube, and Bebo. Search engines have again twigged to this popularity and some are believed to use them as a further indicator of how popular a website is. At the very least they can be used to help build links and generally improve search engine results if they are used properly.

Blogging For Business

Another side of the social web, and one that has been popular for longer than social networking sites, is the blog. Blogs became popular because they provided everybody with a relatively simple and affordable means to start their very own corner of the world wide web. Businesses and websites geared strictly towards profit making can again use blogs to their advantage.

Search Engine Optimisation Trend Spotting

Monitoring search and Internet trends should be a major part of any SEO campaign because what might seem initially like a simple or small change could be a sign of major changes in the future. Search engines routinely change and improve their algorithms in order to ensure that they continue to offer their users the best possible search engine results.

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