Topics Include: The End of SEO/Content really IS king, Avoiding Obsolescence, Book of Lists

The End of SEO/Content really IS king

The latest news on the search engine optimization (SEO) front is that a pure focus on page rank optimization alone won't yield the results small businesses are looking for in the future. Google and Bing are changing the rules so often and are getting so good at figuring out the real businesses that deserve to be on search result pages that standard SEO tactics don't impact results much. And, with searches on hot topics like Tiger Woods, you're now getting results pages filled with items from Twitter and Google News, things that SEO doesn't affect. Just being an SEO expert isn't enough anymore. You need to be able to create content that Google's algorithms are willing to put on these hybrid pages.

On the plus side, Google's systems are capable of giving far better analytics to small businesses than they did a year ago. They know a LOT more about user behavior once someone clicks on a link, including being able to tell if the user called the business or bought something.

To succeed in the coming decade, you'll need to move beyond focusing on optimizing search engine results and page rankings and become much more focused on online marketing as a whole. Content will need to be directly related to targeted users, and you'll need to become adept at using social networks like Facebook and Twitter to attract and track prospects. For more on this topic, here's an interview with co-founders of ROI.works George Revutsky and Dustin Kittelson on the future of small business online marketing. If you want to talk through what this all means for your organization's online marketing strategy, let me know. matt@hodgsonconsult.com.

Avoiding Obsolescence

In other random year end reading I came across this article from the Silicon Alley Business Insider on 21 things that became obsolete this decade. It made me wonder, what else will become obsolete this decade, and more importantly, what do you or I need to do to make sure it's not us?

The answer I found was that if you want to know if a ship is going to sink, watch what the richest passengers do. iTunes and file sharing doomed Tower Records the minute the customers buying hundreds of records a year switched. Amazon and the Kindle are on their way to killing the bookstore. The typical American buys only one book a year for pleasure. All those people you see browsing at your local Borders are meaningless to the store, unless they buy. It's the heavy users that matter, and as 2009 ends, these folks have abandoned the bookstore in search of cheaper/more convenient alternatives.

When law firms started switching to fax machines en masse, Fedex realized that the cash cow part of their business (100 or 1000 or more envelopes per firm per day) was over and switched quickly to packages. Good for them. In the coming year, keep an eye on your top customers. Where they go, so does your market.

I make one final and revolutionary prediction – by 2020, the stand alone plastic keyboard will be a thing of the past – we will either have cool glowing gloves (looking almost Michael Jackson like) which will allow us to type in a "virtual keyboard" either projected or that appear on our monitor, or we will type directly on our monitor (which will be almost L shaped).

You heard it here first ladies and gentlemen – welcome to the new decade.