As the year 2009 draws to a close, its time to analyze what all has
happened over the past year, what has worked and what has not, and what
can be done in the next year. One of the most active industries of the
web has been the Search Market.
Google has recently come up with
its set of predictions for 2010 talking about where Search is headed
and how things can get heated up in the next year. Google's Matt Cutts
discussed some of his own predictions for search in a recent upload to
Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel. Here are some things he
stressed upon:
New Types of Data
Information
overload is fast becoming one of the key concerns of the web search
industry. A regular web search generally returns a series of links
which users have to further refine in order to find what they are
really looking for. And the whole process becomes time-consuming. And
that is why Google has always been looking to segregate new types of
data. Be it Google Book Search, Google Patent Search and so on.
In
the coming years, focus on optimizing your content for all these
categories so that you can rank highly in the specific filters.
Semantic Search
Search
is no more about simply matching queries with the keywords and
delivering results accordingly. Many people think that Google simply
crawls the web and returns pages that contain words that match with the
search query. But that's not it. Google's search process has become
more sophisticated. When a search query is entered, then it takes into
account all the synonyms, morphology elements etc. to deliver content
that is relevant to the search query.
Therefore, make sure you
use lots of synonyms in your content. Also, relevancy should be a key
concern in your website content strategy. Cutts cites the example of
Google Squared that takes a category and creates a starter 'square' of
information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across
the web.
Cloud Storage
As people move to the
Internet gradually, they are increasingly getting comfortable with
storing their data in the cloud. And in the coming times, more people
will migrate their data from their hard drives to different cloud
services. This will in turn make it easier and better for search and
help Google deliver more relevant results.
Real Time Search
Real
time will become a definitive force in the coming times. People like to
be updated with the latest news and updates. They want the 'scoop' of
everything. This is the reason why microblogging website like Twitter
would be a great hit in the coming future. Make sure you have a strong
presence on social media websites and be active there.
Mobile Web
People
need information on the go. And an increasing population of users are
accessing the web through their mobile devices. Thus, it is important
for your business website to cater well to the mobile web users. Make
sure you build a mobile version of your website that renders well on
major mobile web browsers.
