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2008 – what can we expect?

Having survived the the new-years party tolerably there are now barely 366 days in this year in front of us. Time to come up with some thoughts about this years possible progression in the eyes of a searchengineoptimizers.

SEO will become more demanding
A trend that has been steadily around for the last few years will continue in 2008. searchengine operators are continually developing their technologies and are therefore raising the bar bit by bit. Most of these developments are not noticed by many mainly because they are drowned by the daily business. If we take a retrospective look at optimization methods that were common 3 or 5 years ago however, we can clearly see that this whole subject-matter is only slowly growing up. Google's course of action against webcatalog-operators, linksellers and recently also article-directories will not be over at the turn of the year. Those who worked clean and future-oriented in the past will profit from this and many others will have to orient themselves anew. Due to the fact that large publishing houses, like the SPIEGEL recently, open their archives (I have already mentioned this a few month ago) the average quality of searchresults will grow – this is also something where a reaction is needed.

borders will become more transparent
Searchengineoptimization has not been a marked-off business segment for a while. The cooperation with other areas will intensify again in 2008 and SEO-knowhow will be used more strongly and earlier on in processes like the relaunch of websites. Tools like social-media-optimization, linkbaiting or reputation management will become better known and more widespread this year and will therefore change the daily routine of many searchengineoptimizers.

Google will keep growing as alternatives are missing
Google will keep his dominating market share in 2008 and will even expand it in some markets. There will be efforts to establish new search engines (like WikiaSearch) but for large masses of users to abandon Google the quality of these new searchengines will have to be significantly higher than that which Google is offering now. I just can not see this happening at this time – maybe approaches like semantics will be able to achieve this but I would be surprised if we were to see a breakthrough in that area in 2008. Seeing that there is not much room for improvement for Google in the searchmarket we will see new applications and projects. Here we anticipate that besides the Wikipedia competitor “Knol” we will see projects like Google Health or the Google Drive (online harddrive), which for probably put all hairs on end for all those who can spell “protection of privacy”. We can only hope that Google's slogan “don't be evil” will be felt more strongly in these areas in the future.