With the embark of the cut throat competition and hunger for affluence, social relationships were on the point of gradual extinction, when suddenly the twist in the doomsday had the thunderous breakthrough with social networking emerging from its embryonic cocoon.

You find youngsters and business networking people hooking up to these for their own reasons. Virtually though, the connectivity has soared by simultaneously widening the dimensions of its existence and erasing out the need of face-to face once needed encounters.

As 2008 came upon us, we made our resolutions. By now, we have either made plans on how to achieve them, or maybe, discarded them this early. For businesses, "Where to find the next customer?" is a common problem. Some, if not most, small businesses simply rely on sheer luck, putting away their lead generation plans because they don’t have the budget that large corporations do.

The year is slowly coming to a close. In another month, we are yet again, close to the wrapping up of another year.

So sitting back in my chair, I decided to make a list of all the things that we, as SEOs will be doing in the coming year. Will things change all that much from what it was in the beginning of this year?

Social Networking

I came across a funny post that I have added below. It highlights the importance of a search engine friendly site in a light hearted way:

Perry Marshall

The most precious commodity in business today is attention.

Don't sell people what you think they should want. Sell them what they want.

Because no matter how motivated you are, the laziest guy in the world can still move more dirt with a borrowed bulldozer than you can with a shovel!

Most people just imitate their competitors, and everyone just gets dumber every year.

Its official. The internet has become the accepted medium of advertising and more businesses are turning towards the web instead of the traditional newspaper, radio and tv advertising which are becoming unaffordable especially for small entrepreneurs.

According to Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) that released the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, advertising revenues from Jan to June 2007 was nearly $10 billion. This is a 27% increase than last year, at the same time.

If you have not heard or used Google maps yet, let me tell you, it is a lot of fun! You can zoom in and out of locations and privacy issues have been questioned. But its still a useful tool and has many uses apart from the obvious.

With the popularity of mobile browsing, having your business listed in Google Local/Maps has its advantages. Businesses that have a local brick and mortar business benefits from being listed here.

When was the last time you decided to rope in open source to help you out of a software requirement?

There is much hype about Web 2.0. So what do the internet users really think? Or rather, what are the corporates doing? Are they using it to its maximum potential and rolling in cash?

Lets look at the current scenarios. In the current landscape of the business environment, almost all office tasks involve online or information technology transactions. The office landscape has been completely modified, and there is nothing companies' management can do but acknowledge the trend.

Building links to increase traffic / optimization / links can be segregated into two buckets: On page and Off page optimization.

Once the website is optimized, meta tags, headings, img alt, everything has been neatly labeled and submitted for crawling, the next focus is on off page optimization.