So, here we are, preparing to say farewell to 2007 and welcome to 2008 - another year of online marketing developments and changes. The world of online marketing is always evolving and changing, and reading up on the latest developments is an established part of our daily routine. As well as the small daily shifts, there have been some seismic ones this year.  Here’s a look back at the most memorable, and some tips to stay ahead of the developments we expect to see as they happen in the New Year.

Moving Towards the Individual’s Needs

Personalisation is a big thing on Google’s agenda. This year, Google began tailoring people’s search results based on sites they had previously visited and their general behaviour online. This is currently only active in the United States, but the idea is that providing people with their personalised set of results pages for each keyword will give better results to individuals rather than ‘the average searcher’. It presents a challenge to us online marketers, but fortunately, this has not yet reached the UK yet and we are watching how this unfolds in the US and what solutions US online marketers develop. 

Just Text? That is soooo Web 1.0!

The web has taken great strides in recent years, with the advent of video, audio and a host of other media options taking the web from a glorified book to a whole new interactive experience. Online videos and podcasts are not new to this year, but they have taken the big step of leaping off the internet's pages to getting regular mentions in the mainstream media. The fact that Google, the biggest name in search, bought YouTube this year tells you how important other media will soon become to SEO. We've covered the improvements video can have on your site conversion before, and it's an aspect of SEO that isn't going away anytime soon. We advise you to start looking at your options and how you can integrate this into your site.

Social Networking Explosion

The other big online trend that’s made offline media headlines is the sudden expansion of social networking. Once again, sites like Facebook, MySpace and the granddaddy of them all Friendster are not a 2007 development (the latter was born in 2002!), but their acceptance into mainstream culture is. There is a belief in marketing that social websites are the way forward because people are more likely to trust one-on-one recommendations rather than the marketing spin that we hear so often from business owners. The trouble is that although the ideas are out there of how the social web is best marketed, the most successful plans are quite expensive and can be beyond the budgets of anyone but the biggest companies with the biggest wallets. We’ve been running experiments throughout the year, both internal and with a few of our clients and are finding ways of achieving good results at much lower costs.  As a result, we expect many more of our clients to be able to get on the social media ladder over the coming 12 months.

Tying Everything Together

Although it still hasn’t reached the UK, Universal Search was a big change of direction for Google when it was slowly implemented in the States earlier this year. The idea that a search will bring up a selection of websites, pictures, news articles, blogs, videos and books is an intriguing concept which will have a real effect on SEO. If there are fewer spaces for conventional websites, then getting a place in the top 10 of Google for your favoured keyword is going to become considerably trickier. The way forwards for our clients will be to begin incorporating forums, blogs, videos, and a host of other options into their sites in order to maintain their rankings and exposure.  But we see this as a good thing as they help increase site conversion rates, thereby reducing the cost per acquisition of leads and sales.

Yahoo! Copies Adwords

In June earlier this year Yahoo! announced they were ditching their old, clunky and awkward pay-per-click engine in favour of a new ‘I can’t believe its not Adwords’ model called ‘Panama’. The result is a little less clunky and a little less awkward, but still streets behind Adwords in our eyes, despite mimicking its best features namely a reduced creative description (dropping from 180 to 70 characters), grouped formatting, removing the bid tool and adding a quality score.

Roll on 2008

So, that was 2007, but what can we expect from 2008? Well for one thing, we fully expect the move towards personalisation continuing in earnest. One interesting development Google seem to be experimenting with is the idea of voting on websites, allowing users to ‘vote up’ the sites they find useful, and ‘vote down’ or even banish the sites they don’t like from their personal search results.

Another growing area of importance to us online marketers is mobile phone marketing , which we explored earlier this year. The fact that ‘must have’ gadgets like the iPhone and the latest iPod have mobile browsers, means that more of your traffic than ever before will be coming from smaller screens and it's vital to be ready to deal with them. With Google unveiling plans for its own mobile phone platform a few weeks ago, you can be sure that mobile marketing is going to be essential soon – if not next year, then the year after that.

Finally, when universal search does make its way over to our shores, it’s imperative to get your companies listed across as many online media types as possible to ensure that your brand appears in the search engines as much as possible. With less space in the search engine rankings to appear in, your main site needs to be sleekly optimised to make the cut – and if you play your cards right you may find you appear in the listings more than once, in video, photos, blogs and news. We’ve got some tips on how to do this in our earlier article ( Google to Unveil Universal Search ).

If 2007 was anything to go by, 2008 will be remembered for an impressive number of trends and new initiatives that will present challenges to online marketers. As usual we will be on hand to explain how the changes will affect you with this newsletter throughout the upcoming months.  And if we don’t, then just call and ask!