• Content and Site Design Will Matter More

Google has recently made some changes to their algorithm which penalizes low quality websites that are built for the sole purpose of attracting clicks on search engines. This increases the quality of search results overall, as searchers are now less likely to be directed to a website that has irrelevant content or is just a dumping ground for advertisements. Quality, relevant content will be necessary. As Google is now showing snippets of websites when a user hovers over the search results, having a site that is attractive to the user is also going to be a lot more important. Working on the design elements of your site is thus recommended.

• Google + Will Matter More For SEO

While there is some debate as to whether Google + will ever have any relevance as a personal social network and few people now expect it to be a serious rival to Facebook, it looks like Google + will matter to business users a lot more. This is because Google + results will also be indexed in search engine results and will be given a high degree of relevance, just like YouTube videos are shown in search results. Whether or not you believe Google + will be important in your online marketing strategy overall, it would be a very good idea to have an account on the network.

• Rating, Review and Consumer Opinion Sites Will Become Very Important

While these sites have existed for more than 15 years now, review websites are going to get more relevance in search results. Already, we can see results for comments left about a certain business appearing near the top of search results when that business name is searched for on Google. For business owners, this means two things. First, offering a quality product or service, which will avoid consumers complaining about them on these sites. Second, monitoring search results for their business name, associated keywords as well as entries regarding them on review and opinion websites. Many of these sites give the chance for business owners to respond to any comments, both positive and negative. This will give potential customers that are checking out your business a good feeling that you care about their opinions and that you want to help them resolve any issues that they may have. This applies to any business that targets the consumer market, whether online or offline. Review websites for Business to Business companies, while not as popular, still exist and should be paid attention to as well if this is the line of business in which you operate in.

Which Changes Will be Brought to Online Marketing in 2012 – Part 3 is a post from: Websites For Sale

Google has for the last year have been slowly changing the way their search works, for example the search results are more tailored to the individual using the computer.  The new design is very similar to bing and yahoo.  But Google still dominate the search engine niche with last month being one of their best months in terms of users using Google compared to other search engines.

The new SERPs may make SEO webmasters a little worried as to how users will now start to use the new tools that Google provides users and how results will be displayed.  I can say that my traffic stats to my website haven’t changed much since the new Google changes have been introduced but my enquiries and sales have dropped a little which makes me think if this is a result of the recent Google changes, but i doubt very much as my bounce rate is still the same so im just guessing its a seasonal issue.

The options in the left panel of the new look Google pull from “everything” – classic Google results (universal, organic, paid, etc.), blogs from Google Blog Search, Books from Google Books (which includes magazines), Images from Google Image Search, News from Google News, Maps from Google Maps, Shopping from Google Product Search, Videos from Google Video (which includes videos from YouTube and other sources), and Updates from Google’s real-time search.

You will also notice that at the end of the search results page it will show live results from Twitter and match any keywords from a live feed directly from Twitter.  Google is moving more towards giving you live results as its constantly improving the way it gives the end user results.

I recently ran an experiment using Twitter as a way to get traffic from using the live twitter service on Google by using a plugin on my wordpress blog that updated my twitter account every 15 mins with new articles and this brought in alot of traffic as Google was picking up my keywords in my tweets and giving them tops spot on the results of Google helping direct organic traffic straight to my blog.  The only drawback on this was the plugin i was using crashed my server as it was using alot of bandwidth as it was an autoblog adding 7 new articles every minute, so you can image what this did to my server.  However at the time i was getting around 500 clicks, many from very competitive keywords on Google via the Twitter live feed.

New Google SERPS Means More Traffic For Your Website is a post from: Websites For Sale