SEO for accountants news - Search engine optimisation in the past year

9 January 2009

Google changes and improvements have been highlighted by search experts as the key developments in the world of search engine optimisation (SEO) in their review of the past year.

Mark Chapman, Fuse Optimisation's e-business manager, said, "One of the most exciting and interesting developments is Google's deep focus on search personalisation."

Fuse Optimisation is one of the UK's leading search specialists in SEO for accountants and law firms, as well as financial services firms and retailers.

He said, "Google is clearly changing the way results are delivered and seems to be virtually training the average searcher to expect more than 10 plain blue links when its search pages load."

The recent launch of SearchWiki demonstrates how users are being encouraged to 'vote' for search results they prefer. At the same time, website owners and new media developers are being encouraged to create multimedia to have their images and video clips show up in search results.

"To my mind, Google is developing the world's most powerful multimedia publishing platform. Books may not be history just yet but all the time the world's companies, organisations and writers publish and monetise their material on Google, the less books need to be used," said Fuse's Chapman.

Fuse's views have been echoed by other experts. Jill Whalen, High Rankings CEO, and Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable's editor, agreed that SearchWiki and Universal Search were significant events in the search engine arena.

Barry is reported as saying, "No matter what Yahoo, Microsoft or anyone else is doing, what Google is doing is going to have a tremendous impact just because it's the one more people use."

Rand Fishkin, from SEOmoz, warned about Google's increasing dominance. He had hoped Ask, Yahoo and Microsoft might prevent the search giant from achieving more than 90 per cent market share in global search results. However, this hope looks likely to be short-lived with Google's UK market share already poised to tip over this figure and global use already substantially close to meeting this target.

Mike McDonald, at WebProWorld, said 2008 marked the beginning of a race to a more language / intent / semantic approach to search. Michael Gray, Atlas Web Service Owner and President, pointed out that search engines failing to provide rich media results were seen as behind the times.

Fuse Optimisation has seen steady growth in search traffic to various multimedia it has developed and posted on client sites including videos, audio and images, especially materials used to improve search engine optimisation (SEO) for accountants and law firms.

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