Lots have happened in the year 2009: real time search, twitter and facebook surpassing google in terms of traffic, pagerank sculpting, google new algorithm caffeine, personalized search and much more.
Let me give you some recommendations for the year 2010 and beyond:
- Careful with easy to manipulate links like blog rolls, sponsored themes and paid blog links. Their value decreases day by day.
- Banner ads and image links are still OK. Use them in paid and non-paid contest.
- Time on site is a huge factor: if you manage to get traffic but your visitors are not staying on your site then you do not have anything valuable to offer hence you do not deserve traffic.
- Visitors are using search.twitter.com more and more. Make sure your twitter posts contains a keywords at the very beginning of your short post
- Blog comments – make sure you are adding value, if you’re planning to comment with something like “great post” don’t bother.
- Answer questions on Yahoo Answers – you’ll get links (NoFollow), traffic, signups and YES conversions. Leave your URL in the resource box
- Schedule your tweets. Remember Twitter is about what happens right now so, you want to leave messages often without spending too much time doing it.
- Focus on DoFollow social bookmarking sites only. The rest (other than the big guys liek Digg and StumbleUpon) is not worth your time.
- Website age seems to be a little more important so, if you are planning to buy some old domains (with link jouice) and doing a 301 redirect make sure you do it right.
- There is going to be more emphasis on social media links (not social bookmarks) but links and stories that have the power to go viral
- Use Google hot trends (http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends) and tweet about it. Pick topics relevant to your business
- Community building will take most of your internet marketing time. Make sure you measure ROI and you use your time efficiently
- Publishing press releases still has the power to make your story go viral. It isn’t so important as it was in the past in terms of link building.
- Although videos are still incredibly powerful their importance is a little scaled back with the advent of he new Google algorithm “caffeine”.
- Caffeine also shows a slight value increase to exact match domain names.
- FriendFeed seems to be more important than Facebook and Twitter. Take advantage of it before it’s too late.
- With personalize search (even if you are NOT logged into your Google account) will render your SEO ranking software obsolete. Do not bother buying the new and update version
- Focus on traffic; your analytics package will tell you if your strategy is working or not
Hope this helps, feedback in encouraged