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The SEO industry is almost certain to grow stronger in 2010. With the full launch of Bing rivalling Google for the users who browse the internet, there is bound to be a lot of focus on optimising for Bing in a similar way to how we treat Google now. One of the main factors towards Bing being successful is that all the new Windows 7-based computers have Bing set as the default search engine on the default browser, Internet Explorer 8. For those of us in the web development industry, this isn’t good news. Personally, I wish everyone would use Mozilla Firefox to browse the internet. For development purposes it has so many more features, is very customisable and doesn’t have as many bugs as IE.

Other than Bing competing strongly as a major search engine, another thing to look out for is the use and implementation of social media optimisation (SMO). Websites and platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Squidoo, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube can all be utilised to raise awareness of your brand, as well as for building good relationships for gaining links and traffic. Google’s new index has been applied to a few data centres so far and will continue to grow and we may see some fluctuations in rankings due to this. All in all, 2010 will be an interesting and challenging year for the SEO industry, but these are exciting prospects that we relish.

Rob Bromilow
Natural SEO Programmer

Google has launched a new update for the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. It’s a service that allows the shortening of URLs and is particularly useful for micro blogging services such as Twitter to make links easier to share due to character limitations on most of these services. The “Google URL Shortener” will only be available through FeedBurner and the Google Toolbar at the moment which limits its use. However, Google plans on making it available to a wider audience if it proves that people find it useful. The service is built on Google’s global infrastructure which has a lot of benefits such as stability, security and speed to give faster resolution of URLs and better protection against phishing and spam.

As most people know, URL shortening has been around for quite some time and it’s not surprising that with the popularity of social media Google has jumped on the bandwagon. However, there are other services which offer similar or better services than goo.gl such as bit.ly which has been around longer and offers link tracking which at the moment goo.gl does not. So it looks like Google may have a bit of an uphill struggle considering the current competition.

Adam Wood
SEO Programmer