If there's one message that needs to be clearly understood in 2011 by website owners, it's that Google is no longer the only game in town! Social Search and Mobile Web are carving up the online landscape and opening up alternative routes to drive visitor traffic and convert niche customer engagement.
Yes, aspects of established online marketing will still prevail and email marketing continues to play a valuable role on the user platforms and channels of a rapidly diversifying web. Google, itself, has been recalibrating algorithm, search indexing and SERPS to more accurately reflect relevant, semantic content activity and bring more personalised results, with indications of 'social signal' acknowledgement.
Since Autumn of 2010, and with the aim of reinforcing the principles of 'relevance' and 'prominence', Google has been placing greater emphasis on returning localised search results, slightly altering the placement of PPC ads and displaying reviews from Google Places. This is where the importance of SEO comes into play, focusing on keywords directly related to geolocated products and services by customer search proximity.
Of course, established routines of SEO implementation are still important to individual page content within overall website design and inbound link building.
But it is within social search via social media content that SEO is playing an increasing role in traffic results and PageRank. The left hand side column of Google is now an extended menu of options including 'realtime' search and both Bing and Yahoo include social search within their algorithms.
A new search engine called Blekko has also recognised the implications of 'social trust' in the new mobile and micro blog fast lane by integrating 'social mentions by trusted users' in the social network, and thereby, automatically screening out spammed websites.
Past user search behaviour is a primary factor and 'universal search' now takes into account the social dimension, with sophisticated filters indexing user viewing of blogs, articles, videos and social media sites plus recommends from the searcher's social network.
Ultimately, the results delivered will more accurately reflect a personalised search behaviour profile, which is more instantly relevant and perfectly adapted to the superfast search environment of the mobile web.
The signs pointing to increased visitor search by social and mobile in 2011 are very clear. The integration of both within diversified online marketing campaigns are the template policies website owners must accept and adopt to stay visible and relevant online in the next twelve months.