There are many things  several professionals are talking about on how search engine optimization will be in 2010. SEO has always been a do and observe type of science & art, and everyone will always have their own opinion about it. As long as you have an open mind to new ideas, backed up with your own testing by doing your own experiments, and continuously sharing with other professionals, you will get a good pulse of what’s coming in. According to me, this is what will be coming in 2010, read more on the 2010 search trends below.

  1. Social Media Optimization
  2. Better Link Development
  3. On-page Optimization

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

SMO is not just “putting up a Facebook and Twitter account and adding as many friends as you can and your done“. Social Media is really about the community. The building of the community and socializing, more interesting interactions and less hard selling. Social Media has served well when used as a medium for customer support, product and service feedback and has been less successful when used solely for new product or service promo offerings. Social Media’s role in SEO has been:

  • Get links from Social Media sites – blog, forum, daily status, micro blog, etc, as long as there is a link and it is search engine friendly, it is good.
  • Get links from Communities – if you have some interesting content, the moment someone reads it will link to it and promote it further. Social Media serves as a medium to promote your content to more people.
  • Dominate search results – your own social media profiles can potentially rank well for your targeted keywords and possibly push down your competitors so you can dominate the first page.

In 2010, all of the above will be true, but Google has already implemented the Real Time Search, where in real time, news, microblogs and social media status are posted in SERP snippets.

Better Link Development

Link diversity is not a new SEO concept, but for some reason the common link spammers will always exist and Google and other search engine will always try to track them down and apply filters to make the spammer’s efforts less successful.

Almost every kind of whitehat link building can be viewed in a blackhat point-of-view if you really want to view it that way. Adding diversity can always help in proving links to be more natural than artificial.

On-page Optimization

It has been well known discussion “what is more important, off-page or on-page search engine optimization?“. Of course these are two different things and some people tend to compare them based on their different experiences since one SEO ranking factor can always outmatch the other depending on the situation. Many people are not realizing On-page SEO is not just writing the right content within the proper tags, but coding websites properly as well.

  • Document Weight or Loading Time
  • Structured Web using Microformats
  • Tags to Define Language & Location
  • First Link Proximity
Social Media serves as a medium to promote your link baitable content even to more people maximizing the word-of-click promotion.