My 2008 SEO and Online Marketing predictions

Category: Future Predictions, Link Baiting, Link Building, Online Marketing, SEM, SEO, Social Networking

This is something I have been giving considerable thought to the past few months. I did not get around to sharing some of my 2008 SEO and online marketing predictions yet but since it is march already and there is about to be a big shift in the seo and online marketing industry this year I think I would like to get some of the points out to you. The catalyst for this post was yesterdays post by Andy hagans over at Tropical SEO with his predictions of which I am almost in exact alignment with (great minds think alike :)) … but I would like to elaborate on some more predictions also…

1) Link building as it is being performed today will die this year and we are going to have to find smarter ways to build links = link baiting

• This means a big shift in how the SEO industry will need to build links. The costs will rise significantly.
• At least 80% of the linking sources are going to disappear due to search engines penalties. These are sites purely built to accept links in their “resources” sections. This will not apply to well established websites which have useful resource section though. It will come down to the ratio of quality content vs resource link pages which is quite easy to detect.
• SEO companies are going to have to build privately owned networks of high quality websites in order to leverage these sites for building a very limited number of links to their client websites from within the content. These links will need to supplement the content in order to be of advantage for SEO. Relevancy will be the keyword here!
• Search engines are already starting to home in on outbound link vs surrounding content relevance and overall page and domain relevance. So to get SEO value from links, relevancy and usefulness of the link is going to become a bigger factor then it has been in the past.
• There will be 3 ways to get this right (which I can think of right now)
  • The classical way (good things never die!) - Having very useful content that other webmasters will naturally link to from within their content when referencing your work. (This takes us to point 2 below)
  • Owning or having access to changing the website where the link is placed. Building a network of your own websites (see above)
  • Paying high prices to webmasters for very strategic placements of links (can only be done in private or penalties can be face - Look at TLA)

2) Premium content will become more and more significant (this ties in with link baiting by the way).

• Website owners are going to have to improve the quality of their content in order to maintain past rankings.
• Content is going to become more expensive to companies in order to gain and maintain rankings. This is simply a fact. We can’t get around this.
• SEO companies will need to invest in expert writers. Again, the cost for quality content will rise.

3) Social media sites (social networking) is about to take a dive.

• They are just being spammed by people just wanting to promote their content (good and bad - but often more bad)
• 98% will get penalized like the directories did.
• The 2% (The cream-de-la-cream like digg, del.icio.us, propeller, redit) will stay but implement nofollow tags so as to ward of link builders. They will be useful for traffic and exposure only. This exposure in turn will indirectly get incoming links yo your site (this is of course a link baiting strategy).

4) Social profile networks like MySpace, Facebook, Hives, Hi5 …etc will become more significant in Online marketing.

• More and more people are starting to see the advantages of these profile social networks in order to keep in touch with old and new friends. They provide a clear benefit to online users which is only growing in popularity.
• These networks will form a big playground for the online marketing industry in many shapes and forms.
• See a recent post I made on popular social networking sites around the world

5) Blogging is going to continue to increase in popularity and SEO value.

• Blogging with high quality content will become extremely valuable for search engine optimization.
• I believe that blogging will become a greater piece of the SEO pie for online businesses who can publish quality service and product related content that can then be used for link baiting and social networking as well as form a platform for building quality links.

I think that 2008 is going to be a rough year for SEO. SEO is becoming more difficult and certainly will become more expensive to do correctly. SEO companies are going to have to wise up and the profit margins will likely decrease. The industry is still very much booming and will continue to do so, but the luxurious position of good seo companies in getting results for clients in a fairly inexpensive way (because it is easy if you know the seo tricks!) and having huge profit margins is going to become more and more challenging.

I may ad to this post over the coming weeks if some more points come to my head so bookmark it and check back in a few weeks.