The world of Search Engine Optimisation is forever changing and as this new year starts there is a lot of evidence that this will continue. As the saying goes “constant change is here to stay”. Whether you are in charge of Search Engine Optimisation for your own business or are running an website optimization Company yourself, you must stay ahead of these changes to make sure you get the best Search Engine Placement possible. The problem is that most company bosses do not understand just how much the search engine arena does change, and convincing them that further measures are necessary for a successful Online Marketing campaign can be challenging. For instance a recently proposed change coming in the new year from the search engine goliath Google is speed ranking. If this goes ahead you will need to be concerned about the time your site takes to load, so not good for all those decorative animated effects your web designer has been planning toadd to your site.

Last year Google made considerable changes to personalised searching, meaning that not all search results will be the same for everybody. So if you do a lot of searching for books and often click on amazon.com then Google will place amazon.com higher in your search results the next time you search for books, while another person who chooses play.com will see that site rise higher in their results. So far this has not meant too much to the Search Engine Optimisation community as the top optimisation methods will still give you the best results, but it is still something that needs to be appreciatedcomprehended, even if it’s just to explain to a client why a particular position in any given search can’t be guaranteed. It’s a characteristic that has been there for a long time now if you have a Google account are logged in and have web history enabled, but now it is available to everybody, as a declaration from Google says “This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser”. You can confirm when a search has been customised in this way by checking for the View Customizations link in the top right of the search page.

The current economic conditions will also have a role to play in the minds of many business owners. Some may be attempting to get the best Search Engine Placement they can for as little expense as possible, and convincing them that further measures are necessary to stay on top of SEO. Almost certainly the best tool in your arsenal in the coming year will be web metrics. The importance of metrics has been increasing in the past few years and this year will see this trend carry on, Amanda Watlington founder of Search for Profit said in a recent interview that a good website optimization Company needs to communicate new metrics to their clients more clearly. ObviouslyIts obvious to do this we must get a better comprehension of Web metrics ourselves, and how changes to the search environment will affect metrics. The main thing is to constantly review your processes, and make sure that any older processes that are no longer working are ditched. So in conclusion some of the changes to look out for are; Site Speed, Universal Search, Real-Time Search, Personalised Search and Local Search. These will be the main changes to affect Online Marketing and Search Engine Placement in 2010.