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

We are also in the business of building websites. From the many requests that we have been receiving, the surprising thing, is that dating websites seem to have taken a backseat. Its social networking sites, which have been gaining ground. From requests to make MySpace, Facebook look-alikes to small community networks. This particular aspect of the Internet, seems here to stay.

According to Data Monitor, social networking will reach $2.4 billion by the year 2012. But the interesting thing is, research shows that 72% of its users will stop using the service if there is a subscription charge. But companies looking to network, recruit and get new businesses (especially the small business entrepreneur), this will be the next big thing.

Article Writing

Article writing has become more affordable for website owners as it can be submitted freely to any ezine. A word document of around 400 - 600 words with information packed in, is a popular strategy for many business owners. With Google flagging duplicate content, the best way to publish articles are by writing a separate set of articles and posting on your site and making changes to the article for publishing in other sites.

Blogs

A blog has the power to drive traffic to the site, that being said, there is a lot of competition in the blog writing arena. Once you commence writing your blogs, getting them into reputed feed readers of ezines is a good way to drive traffic. Submit the blog to blog search engines like Blogrush and MyBlogLog. Blogs are more of a personal nature than articles, yet they must provide insights into the business, current market news and subjects in and around the industry you are in. BlogRush is a powerful addon that displays relevant blogs on your site, and in turn displays your blog on other sites. thus driving traffic to your site. MyBlogLog is a community of bloggers.

Universal Search

Google introduced Universal Search this year, the other search engines were already in on it. Oops! Yellowpages, Superpages and Citysearch has video integration on their searches. Use suitable titles on your videos, podcasts and images. Avoid too much of Flash on the site. Good use of meta tags, metadata (ID3 tags), description and other on page optimization, and you have a good chance of ranking in the search results. Appropriate use of sitemaps also go a long way in helping the search engine spiders search your site.

Press Releases

This is often a forgotten method by many. Some don't consider it important and others don't know how to do it. If done, rightly, press releases can drive traffic to the website. Having an optimized press release, with information can drive journalists and potential customers to the site. There are more than 20 free press release services on the web. If newsworthy, there is a good possibility that it gets picked up and written about, in a newspaper or magazine. This will give you the offline advertising that you need.

Local Vs Global Business

I had written a previous article on how local businesses can benefit from using Google and Yahoo Locals. Other include Truelocal (Australia), Yell (UK), Viola (France), Live, AOL Local, Ask are some of the players in this space.

Paid Listing Vs Organic Listings

The future is in organic listings in search engines, rather than paid listings. Right optimization, good navigation systems, sitemap, relevant content and user friendliness, are some of the keys to getting your website started on the climb upwards in the ranking ladder of search engines.

Quality Vs Quantity: Having relevant content on the site is important. As you, the website owner, is not physically present when a visitor drops into your store, having the right message projected is a good strategy. Assurances that the email id collected will not be used to spam, memberships in reputed organizations, privacy policy, about us and contact details prominently displayed will reassure your store visitor. A mixture of lightly sprinkled keywords, information about your product/ service are some of the essentials of even the most basic website.

So looking at the list, has anything really changed from the beginning of this year? Yes, I think so. Spending time online, establishing your reputation as an expert, is the way to do it. Spending lots of money on just ads, and not doing the rest of the things required will only get you a small percentage of the business that is really out there to be taken with the right approach. Marketing a business online increases the possibility of reaching out to a larger audience, worldwide. You don't have to settle for just the local area, translate your website into different languages, and you suddenly have a much bigger population to cater your business to.

So lets all, not sit there waiting for things to happen, make things happen. Login to Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn or other networking sites and work your way around.

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