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WHERE BUSINESSES GO TO GROW

Online Marketing for 2012

Believe it or not, it’s already December, and if you haven’t already started thinking about how you want to modify your social media, SEO, blogging, and other aspects of your online marketing strategy for the coming year, now is a good time to get started.

Obviously predicting the future is out of the question, but you can easily see the trends evolving in things like search and engagement strategies, and make some projections for how you can stay slightly ahead of the curve.

In terms of SEO, things like page rank and linkbacks will become less important than other factors. Google in particular is starting to use more human-based feedback to determine the importance of sites. This means that providing quality, relevant content will be more important than ever – not for your ranking, but to keep your audience happy so that they improve your ranking by giving you good feedback. While it may seem that this is going to be trickier than simply relying on keyword saturation and links, in the end it will mean better quality for both searchers and the businesses that are competing for ranking.

In the social media arena, the big question is what’s going to happen with Google+. Despite the fact that you can find plenty of experts claiming it’s the Facebook-killer, Google+ still hasn’t managed to gain even half of one percent of the social networking market share, whereas Facebook still enjoys a hearty two-thirds of the entire market. That said, remember there was a time when MySpace enjoyed a similar heyday – just because a site is dominant for a long time doesn’t mean it won’t crash eventually. Facebook has been slowly losing ground, but opinion is still mixed as to whether Google+ is poised for a takeover.

For those who place a lot of importance on their business blogs, it’s important to note that Google is rewarding fresh content more than ever. So, if have been the kind of blogger that sacrifices quantity in favor of less frequent but longer posts, you may want to start balancing things out with shorter posts that get posted more often. That’s not to say that you’ll benefit from filling up your own blog with irrelevant content – remember that repetitive content will hurt rather than help your ranking. As with everything in a marketing strategy, you’ll want to keep things fresh and concise in your business blog in 2012.

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