With the rapid growth of social networking sites, its hard to avoid this course of traffic. To me, it is pretty much a third area of study next in line to SEO and PPC. People refer to social sites as the next generation of SEO but there are so many different aspects to this that even expert search engine marketers have to learn about these sites from square one. Really, the only way to understand their individual ways of operating is create an account with the social networks and be constantly active. Only then, you will start to see similarities between them. The following three social networks have created a huge presence online rapidly and will only grow further in the near future. Complete article on Top Three Social Network Sites with Significant Online Presence

Every webmaster will get to the point where they will gradually realize that it takes more than one person to run an online business or website. It all starts off as a curious hobby and then questions arise. How do I get more traffic? How do I make more money? You need to get more content, you need more links, you need this, that, bla bla bla. By this time, you need to know absolutely everything! The perfect online marketer would need to know SEO, PPC, affiliate marketing awareness, membership aspects, know how to improve conversion, also coding like HTML, CSS, AJAX and so on. Complete article on How to Save Time While Making Money Online

Just when I thought web 3.0 will feature maps and video streaming of our local areas allowing everyone to spy on anything, Google starts talking about mapping the space. Why not. They’re the closest thing to God at the moment since they know everything. It seems like Google is becoming more and more adventurous in their plans and marketing strategies. What will they come up with next? Complete article on Forget Mapping Earth, Google’s Mapping Space

We thought we had it all figured out. But then Web 2.0 comes along changing all the normal strategies of SEO and PPC, glimpses web 3.0 is fast approaching. We have slowly adapted and accepted the idea of human editing and “social bookmarking” against traditional SEO, where we manipulate keywords, get links, subit to directories etc. How far will these changes go and what other developments of online marketing is still to come?

Web 3.0 Predictions

Here are some possible and evident trends:

1/ Video sites - This is a booming media avenue. Why bother reading when you can pretty much watch all the news? Why read books when you have scrolling movies to tell you the story. Website owners have already jumped on board with this trend, with Google themselves buying youtube.com, its a no brainer where this is heading. We will soon be watching TV, watching live sporting events, and even watching our families and friends online will gradually become more accpetable worldwide while the telephone will hit the dumps. If this ever happens…will we even need television? One monitor can do everything. This is already possible and happening in some households but there will definitely be a big evolution with video search and Video SEO and PPC in the coming years.

2/ Search Engines - People are becoming more cluey with what they are searching for online. They don’t just search for “widgets” anymore, for example, they are starting to be more specific and accurate. People are looking for “really cheap blue hairy widgets” (maybe a bit extreme, but you know what I mean). Vertical search engines are on the rise and the big players, Google, Yahoo, and MSN know this is coming. Vertical search engines, I suspect will gradually take large percentages of the world wide traffic. It won’t be 70% Google, 20% Yahoo and 9% MSN anymore (or whatever the percentages are), it could eventuate in 50% vertical search engines, and the other 50% will depend on how the current search engines cope. Imagine studying every search engines algorithm…good luck SEM marketers.

Keep in mind, the algorithms may even be solely dependent on human editing. Social bookmarking sites are already populating URL’s voted the most by humans to the top of their pages. There’s no reason why an algorithm and human editing combination could be noticed in the future. After all, the main purpose of a search engine is to provide relevant results for users and not be manipulated by SEO experts.

3/Maps - We can all clearly see street directories in our local suburbs, but now Google can even see individual houses and people nearby. They’re only photo snapshots at the moment but no doubt this could become a streaming video as well later. Give it another 5 years, and we could use video maps to see what happening on George St in Sydney.

4/Sound Search - A bit out of the ordinary. No real signs of this at the moment but radio, music, and any other form of sound could play a role. Just another strange possibility.

5/Spiders - At the moment search engines can’t crawl flash websites and can not determine its relevancy in their SERPs. Google have admitted that they are working on this already. How long it will take…who knows. This will depend on MSN and Yahoo as well. It will most likely be an internet technology related implementation. Im sure they’ll work together to come up with something. Spiders will be crawling everywhere!

Sound impossible? Believe me its possible and I have proof! With the constant changes in Google algorithm, the link quality and quantity factor is slowly becoming less important. Don’t get me wrong because I still think it is the most important part for SEO, just not as much as before. Heres whats been happening in the past years with link building aspects: Complete article on How To Race To The Top of Google With No Links

Everyone seems to think .gov and .edu sites have some special consideration when it comes to Google algorithm calculating the value of links on these pages. Naturally webmasters would think this since these official .gov and .edu sites dominate the SERP’s and are usually found in the top ten for targeted keywords. The truth is though, Google does not favour these sites and are treated equal to other sites. Complete article on Does Google Favour .gov and .edu sites?

This question has always puzzled webmasters link building campaigns. After Google and other search engines started cracking down on the mass link exchanges between websites, there were talks of using reciprocal linking to push rankings up as possibly a useless strategy of link building. So how effective are link exchanges anyway?

Complete article on Any Value in Reciprocal Link Exchanges?