SEO: Greenlight's top five predictions for 2010

1. Google’s Twitter integration will change fundamentally

Google’s ‘real time search’ offering has so far been underwhelming at best, usually replicating or linking to information that can be found in the pre-existing news results. Greenlight’s prediction is that the Twitter data itself will be relegated to a separate search results page, limited to signed-in users as part of search results from your ‘social circle’ or removed from the results entirely.

Most of the time it’s just not useful, nor is it clear that people actually want the ability to search Twitter from Google. Where it is useful is as a barometer of what is current, so expect to see more subtle integration of Twitter data into indexing processes and algorithms.

2. Google factors the content of videos into page relevancy scores

Google Audio Indexing is a system currently in Google Labs that allows Google to index audio content, specifically from YouTube videos. Its speech recognition software transcribes a video in order to allow the usual indexing process to take place, and Gaudi can then send you directly to the point in a video where a word or phrase is mentioned.

Of more interest to Greenlight, however, is its potential to be used to analyse the content of videos on other sites, and for that content to be factored into the relevancy score for a page. Natural search may no longer be confined to the written word, with video presenters having to ensure they use their target keywords as liberally as possible.

3. Search will be a two-horse race by 2011

Microsoft and Yahoo! finalised their tie-up in early December, shortly after the competition regulators in Australia and Canada approved the deal. We expect other countries to follow suit, paving the way to integration before the year is out. That will mean that Bing powers the natural search results for Yahoo!, while Yahoo! handles advertising for Bing, leaving the search landscape a two horse race.

Having pledged 5-10% of their operating profits ($22.5bn in 2008) to promoting Bing over the next five years, Microsoft has a good chance of increasing Bing’s market share over the next year (much as they have in the US). That could make ‘Microhoo’ worth paying much more attention to from an SEO perspective.

4. Winning the click will be more important than ever

December’s introduction of near universal personalised search by Google means that almost everyone’s rankings are determined in some part by what they’ve clicked on in the past. If your site is regularly clicked on by a user, then it will start to rank higher across the board. Conversely, if it’s never clicked on then its rankings will start to drop for that user.

In addition, one of the ranking methods described in Google’s most recently granted patent relies on clicks to assess what sites should be ranking for the first search term in common query paths. For example, if enough users search for ‘football’, then ‘American football’, then click on NFL.com, NFL.com could start ranking for ‘football’ under the assumption that a significant proportion of users searching for ‘football’ are actually looking for American football.

5. Latency becomes part of the Google algorithm

Latency, the response time of pages on a site, has long been a factor in the Google AdWords quality score. In November, Google’s Matt Cutts gave the clearest hint yet that it will soon become a factor in the natural search algorithms too. Benchmarking response times against competitors, and improving those times will become part of SEO. We think pages will have to load in under a second to qualify for increased rankings.