16 SEM Predictions, Understand Search + Your World, Guide to Google’s Freshness Score

Our first newsletter of 2012 is packed with search marketing goodness, and we’re giving you a sneak peek into this month’s articles before it hits inboxes everywhere. If you love this edition, go ahead and subscribe to our SEO Newsletter; it’s a great way to ensure you’re up to date on the industry’s hot topics and provides a deeper glimpse into some of the trends and issues online business faces every month. So, without further adieux, here are the highlights of January’s SEO Newsletter.

16 SEM Predictions for 2012 by Bruce Clay

This month, our feature article kicks off with Bruce Clay giving 16 predictions for 2012. If you’ve been following our newsletter over the years, you know that about this time each year, Bruce offers his forecast into what lies ahead in the search marketing climate.

This year, he touches on:

• Budget predictions for search in 2012
• Emerging SEM disciplines
• Web marketing conferences
• Impact of Google+
• AdWords costs
• Local SEO
• Offshore labor for SEM
• Content publishing

Plus, check out the link in the article to his 2011 predictions to see how they panned out.

Understanding Search Plus Your World

Our Back to Basics article gives the nuts and bolts of “Search plus Your World,” Google’s new search results that rolled out just this month, plus some extra insight from senior SEO analyst at Bruce Clay, Inc. on if the new search function did, in fact, kill SEO.

In this article by yours truly, I cover:

• How Search+ works: How Google+ factors into the results, what else you can expect in the new search results, what kind of content is featured in the SERP and the various options for viewing results.
• What the implications of Search+ are: Why brands, the public and the government might be concerned about this new search function by Google.
• What personalized and non-personalized results mean: Understanding some of the ranking factors in the various results views.
• If Search+ killed SEO: We explore how SEO factors in a new Search+ world?

Google’s Freshness Score and Why it Exists

The ability for search engines like Google to determine the “freshness” of Web content is required to return the most relevant results. Enter Google’s freshness score. In this article by Brent Yorzinski of Bruce Clay Australia, he dives into the step-by-step fundamentals of Google’s freshness score, how it influences what we see in the search results, and why the freshness signal in Google’s algorithm leaves much to be discovered.

Jessica Lee is the founder and chief creative for bizbuzzcontent Inc., a marketing boutique that focuses on digital content strategy and professional writing services for businesses.

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