5 Things to Keep an Eye on in the SEO World in 2005.

 First of all, what is SEO? It is an acronym for "Search engine optimization".

SEO is a science, of making your site rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Position). There are several factors, that influence your rank. First, and very important - internal site's structure. There are several rules, that have to be met - otherwise search engines will consider a site amateur/spammy/useless and index it badly (and in some cases might even completely drop it from their database).

After some of those rules are met - search engines apply another variable to the site's ranking - backlinks weight and count. Perhaps there are more factors, affecting site's ranking, but those are a very well kept secret (for those exactly same reasons - so that SEO people won't be able to affect site's "natural" score)

What are backlinks?

If site "A" has link to site "B" - we can say, that site "B" has a backlink from "A". If "A" is an authority site,it has more weight in search engine final decision about the rank position. The idea behind this mechanism, is that if site "A" refers to site "B", it probably considers it as a source of good information.

Of course, another logical conclusion is, the more backlinks site has - the better it will be ranked. Again, the idea is, that a lot of sites consider site "B" a trustful resource, and link to it. We can already say, that a good webmaster will take care of its site, organize it, make correct "title" tags, internal links structure and so on (internal optimization), and will then try to get more backlinks, so that his site will attract more users ("traffic") from search engines.

But what if you have a site, and now your goal is to rank higher? Or you are building a site, and what to know, how much effort will it take to be first in ranks? Or if you are a SEO freelancer, and need to decide the price for your job? Well, now you have to study your competition. I have made my mistakes, when initially going into SEO business, I just jumped inside, without thoroughly checking my competitors, and then heavily regretted it. This article gives you tips, on how to avoid those mistakes.

First, you have to see how many backlinks your competitors have. You can use any backlink checker tool to get a list of backlinks for a chosen site. Then you have to see how "big" (or "serious") your competitors are. The same above site allows you to see how many pages of this site Google has indexed (about 200 is medium site, >1000 is more or less professional, > 10000 - professional site, and most chances - tough ).

"PR" of a site - a score of 0..10, is very general estimation of the site by Google. It is no longer as important as it once was, but still, gives pretty good evaluation of the site's importance in the web. After this evaluation, you will have much better insight on your researched topic. You now realize how much effort and money your topic requires, and you can make your decision upon this.

After the latest PR update at Google and MSN's beta search going live, there is one

thing for certain in 2005: the world of search is in for some major changes. There

has been growing speculation around the SEO world that reciprocal linking is a thing

of the past. Rumors are abound that PR means less and less, if anything. Bill Gates

came out of his cave to say that "Today's search is nothing" and that it won't be that

way for long. There are quiet rumblings in the SEO back alleys of a new, state-of-

the-art search engine currently indexing the internet. Websites are dropping off the

face of the planet. And we're all left to sit here and put together the pieces. So what

is in store for 2005?

1) Reciprocal links, while not becoming totally dead, are decreasing in value, and

there will most likely be an algorithm update to lessen their importance. The

original thought process behind the importance of a link was that it was seen as a

"vote" for the linked-to site. Now that reciprocal links are everywhere, it is hardly a

great way to count "votes" for a website. Reciprocal linking will continue around the

internet, although the amount of people who try to get away with one-way links (by

never getting back to you once you've added their link) will increase significantly.

This will, of course, be an attempt to acquire one-way links, which brings us to our

next subject....

2) One-way links and triangle linking, though already quite popular, should explode

over the course of 2005. Both are much harder to control and acquire, which makes

Google happy. The triangle link "ploy" makes links look like one-way links even

though "Site A" is returning the favor to "Site B" through "Site C". There will be

attempts to sell triangle linking programs and systems by SEO companies, however,

the complexity, difficulty and time involved in this scheme will produce ridiculous

prices.

3) What this about a new search engine that is going to index every site on the

internet, EVERY 10 seconds? Become.com has turned a few heads with it's claims.

Site owners have reported Become Bots spidering "like crazy". It's all quite hush,

hush, however and you need to have an invite in order to test it out. It should be

interesting to see what they're capable of if and when they decide to go live. I'll go

out on a limb and say that it's a household name by this time next year.

4) MSN will scrap the "beta" tag on February 1st from it's sparkling new search

engine, which is currently live at search.msn.com and Bill Gates thinks it will rival

Google. There is a lot of debate over this issue, but there is no denying that it is far

better than the old chugger they were using before. Love him or hate him, Gates has

most likely given a hard right to the chin of Yahoo!, which seems to be suffering

from a magnitude of quality problems. MSN will be second to Google in total

searches in 2005.

5) PR still has importance. However, it is also decreasing in value. PR is only based

on the quantity and quality of links (both inbound and outbound) from the given

web page. The most obvious reasoning for the declining importance theory is due to

the fact that on any given search on Google, the PR of each page seems to have

barely any correlation with it's place in the rankings. For all you PR lovers out there,

hold on to your toolbar's tight, because this could be a bumpy ride.