Omar Kattan

With the anticipated launch of Google ’s Caffeine in the New Year and the focus on real time  and personalised search, 2010 is promising to be a nail biting  time for webmasters.  Here are a few tips to maintain your rankings in 2010:

1) Website load time.  In 2010 website load time will be a critical factor in determining which sites rank at the top of Google’s search results.  Ensure your site loads quickly and that it does not have any broken links.  Use tools such as  this and check against the top sites ranking for your keyword.  Ensure that your site’s loadtime is better than theirs.

2) Brank visibility.  2010 will also take into account your brand’s visibility on the net.  Make sure you optimise your social media assets such as your Twitter profile, your Facbook page , Flickr , LinkedIn and YouTube.

3) Real Time search.  Google and Bing recently paid 15 and 10 million dollars to index Twitter.  This was done primarily due to the fact that real time search will be an important factor in 2010.  Ensure that you produce enough content that can keep your social profiles active.

4) Universal Search.  Universal results or bleneded results will become even more prominent in 2010.  We’ve already started seeing the effect of Universal results in 2009 but 2010 promises to be the year when these results will become more of the norm.  Ensure you invest in multimedia content such as images, videos and news.

5) Personalised Search.  Google recently announced that it has switched it’s default search results to “personalised”.  With this being the case, ensure that your site is optimised to rank for the various keywords in your consumers buying cycle.  Also ensure that your site is user friendly in order to decrease bounce rates.  Google will be keeping an eye on bounce/click through rates in 2010.

In addition to the above, make sure that you follow all the basic SEO best practice techniques as recommended by the main search engines.

Happy Holidays!

Google recently announced it’s top secret project codenamed “Caffeine”.  This project seems to have been a few years in the making and meant to capitalise on the growing interest in “real time search” and the “semantic web”.

I have yet to see any major changes in Google’s search results due to Caffeine but maybe this is because it has yet to be launched in the UK.

The test bed for Caffeine is the US market.  Actually, in Google’s official announcement, they provided a link to the DC hosting the “new and improved” search results.

What are the implication of Caffeine to webmaster around the world?  More specifically, how will Google’s new algorithm impact SEO efforts.  Here are my thoughts:

1) Now more than ever, Brand presence in social media has become increasingly important as Google Caffeine will place more efforts on social media noise among other factors.

2) Google Caffeine boasts a larger and more comprehensive  index of results.  This means that webmasters need to ensure (now more than ever) that their websites are as accessible and spider friendly as possible.  Load time of web pages in now becoming increasingly important in ranking results.  Don’t skimp on your hosting!

3) The semantic web is fast closing in on us.  Google Caffeine has an improved element of semantics in it’s algorythm.  What does this mean?  Well if you’re writing a page about dogs and “man’s best friend”  for example is not included, this could hinder your ranking efforts.  Web copy needs to take this into account.

4) Following on from point 3 above, information architecture is playing an increasingly important role in rankings.  The idea behind information architecture is to build a website where the information contained within is structured and marked-up in such a way as to portray a sense of authority to search engines.  This factor in itself has always played an important role in search rankings however Caffeine’s launch will make this even more of a critical ranking factor!

We are yet to see the full implications of Caffeine but one thing’s for certain, the days of traditional SEO methods are numbered!