Many changes took place in the Internet this past year and as normal practice at this time of the year lets do a quick over view of last years changes.
We could label last year the year of Social Media Marketing or maybe name it the year of blended search with Goggles introduction of both Universal Search and Personalized Search which Yahoo! and MSN/Live followed suit. Some are even saying it is the end of SEO as we all know it. It is defiantly not the end but search marketers and Web site owners will need to change they way they look at optimization.
Many are saying it is the year that the Internet stood up and took notice of the world around it.
The Year of Social Media:
Looking at the popularity of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, social elements of networks like Flickr and YouTube, the rise and fall of social news sites like Digg and Netscape, and the beginnings of social search sites like Mahalo and Search Wikia, it would be fair to call 2007 the Year of Social Media. Even Google got involved, with the launch of its OpenSocial APIs.
The Year of Blended Search:
One of the most significant changes for search engine optimizers (SEOs) this year was the introduction of universal or blended search results. Instead of the familiar “ten blue links,” searchers are now beginning to see more than just HTML pages mixed into search results. Video and images, news stories, blog posts, local business data, and more are now appearing alongside other sites.
Beginning of the End of SEO:
Search marketing is changing, both expanding into areas like social media and moving away from old stand-bys like on-page optimization. Not that on-page SEO is obsolete, but its importance has diminished, first with the increasing importance of inbound links in search engine algorithms, and more recently in the changing search results pages themselves.
Universal and blended search results are now requiring search marketers to think beyond the basic Web page to consider optimizing images, videos, and other types of vertical content now showing up for many search queries. Besides that, many of the search engines are beginning to experiment with personalized and customized results.
All in all 2007 was the year the Engines focused on its users and they way we are using the Internet today.
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Search Engine Academy of South Carolina
