SEO Changes Afoot in 2010

I’ve written a couple of posts previously about how the search world is changing and some of the things that will keep us on our toes on 2010, but as there’s so much to keep up with, I thought it would help to summarise some of these impending changes.

Here’s a quick summary of some of those posts:

Google Search Getting More Personal

Bing & SEO in 2010

1. Bing & Yahoo – sometime next year, Yahoo’s search engine will be taken over by Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine). Yahoo will continue to exist, but their own search engine will disappear and results will come from Bing.com instead. This means that Microsoft’s share of the search market will double overnight, so now’s the time to start taking a bit more notice of Bing and how your website is faring on it.

2. Google ‘Caffeine’ is rolled out – you may have heard that Google is introducing a new ‘algorithm’ called Caffeine, which in fact is now being slowly rolled out. This affects how Google will index websites and what is going to become important is how quickly your web pages load. Google will be looking at the speed of your site, and if it loads too slowly, you could find your website doesn’t fare so well in results. You need to start looking at how quickly your site loads and if there are particularly large files, e.g images or pdf files, then you need to reduce the file sizes right down. Ask your web developer to check this for you and check your site out on a site speed test, such as Google’s site speed test.

3. ‘Real time’ search becomes more important – with the advent of the social networks and sites such as Twitter, real time search is becoming more and more important and search engines need to keep up with this. Google Caffeine has been introduced partly to address this, so in order to index web sites more effectively, they’re having to speed up the indexing process. This means that more real time search results may appear in search engines and blog posts may appear in results more quickly. The more proactive you are with promoting your site (e.g blogging on a regular basis), the more frequently your site may be indexed.

Probably all sounds rather daunting doesn’t it? Don’t worry we’ll keep you posted with everything that’s going on and debunk it as much as we can!