December 2009 SEO Newsletter: A Great Holiday Gift for Your Search Geek

The 74th volume of the SEO Newsletter hits inboxes today. Subscribers will find all the usual bite-sized news bits from the last month in search and SEO. If your appetite is more substantial, the articles offer just the treat.

The high-level overview of the happenings of the year is a lovely pairing for the nitty-gritty guide to Web design for SEO. And of course, any end-of-the-year edition finds a smooth finish when washed down with some bubbly. But first… you’ll need to have your head on straight for these.

Back to Basics: Web Design for Usability and SEO

Designing a great looking Web site with no thought to search engine optimization is like building a car and forgetting to put gas in it. It isn’t going to go anywhere. However, search engine optimizers also need to know a thing or two about Web design. To balance the needs of both, Web designers must understand:

• What is the site’s purpose
• Who is the target audience
• How to apply that knowledge to design decisions
• How to make the code spider-friendly, and
• How to structure navigation that works for users and spiders.

It’s part of the SEO hierarchy of needs article series, and each of the above points are explained in detail in order to help Web designers and SEOs — two critical individuals on an online marketing team — work together.

Feature: 2009: The Year in Review

As the calendar flips from 2009 to 2010, it’s time once again to analyze the past in order to benefit in the future. The economy is starting to show signs of recovery and the holiday season has thus far out-performed expectations. While some outcomes may be hard to predict, it is possible to look at emerging trends to identify next year’s opportunities. Online marketers must pay attention to developments regarding:

• The search engine landscape
• The ubiquity of the mobile Internet platform
• The expansion of personalized search results
• The rise of real-time search, and
• The gaining acceptance of cloud computing.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ginnerobot/ CC BY-SA 2.0

Further looking forward, Bruce Clay’s predictions for the search engine optimization industry in 2010 will be published in next month’s edition of the SEO Newsletter.

If you’re not a subscriber but you’ll like to check out the newsletter anyway, you can find the full SEO Newsletter archives at BruceClay.com. If you like what you see and you want to become the next subscriber, just enter your email address in the “Subscribe to Our Newsletter” form in the right-hand nav of the blog or this post. Until then, cheers!

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.