I continuously speak regarding link building still (and always) being an important element of SEO and rankings historically as well as in the future.  Link building will always be with us, it’s just changing on how to get the best links toward your sites.  OSE and other tools offer excellent software to give a prespective on each of the softwares interpratation as to what they deem the best links pointing to your site.  These are great tools to evaluate you and your competitors link landscape to consider new platforms and sites for link requests.

So, enter Social Marketing or Engagement Optimization into SEO/SMO.  It’s given at this point that you understand having social share options on every page of your site and that you are integrated within the social graph with the correct meta/code to capture any juice related to engagement.  It’s also understood that you have your sites on many platforms (Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter, YouTube and more).  That being said, how do you go the next step and gain more likes, tweets and +1s?

Well, Twitter is the easiest of all as data is showing the global audience accepting this platform as the starting point for engagement.  I’ve incorporated a custom domain with my bit.ly account to see better data related to has retweeted me and then proactively reached out to those @handles and thanked them with an above 75% follow conversion rate.  In addition, there are many tools to automate the labor intensive practice of Follow/Unfollow pruning to increase followership.  With these tools you can anticipate a 10% increase in followers consistently without even touching your account.

But the “firehose” is off and data from Twitter (and Facebook) is off to Google.  Google is displaying G+ information marginally higher then others, which leads us to the Antitrust discussion (and Google Anti-SOPA and Antitrust video we distributed which accumulated over 3,000 views).  Thus, the engagement of Facebook and Twitter will certainly have a great advantage on the Bing/Yahoo side at this time.  Consider more activity in Google+ (personal and brand) for more authority within the graph and toward your pages.

Lastly, LinkedIN as a link-bait tool and brand authority magnet is my all time favorite.  Tools available within their pro membership allow for more advanced networking to find prospects.  ”Do Follow” links (three of ‘em) and a lot of great spots for continuous content to be placed lead to a nice platform.  Add in the blog aggregation and other apps (albeit, a little limited at this time) and LinkedIN is the professional platform.

Introducing Pinterest, Quora and other new and exciting opportunities for the future of social and it leads us to a never ending land of opportunity for continued engagement optimization.  Always connect your platforms to extend your reach and evaluate potential followers and members Klout score to prioritize your outreach efforts.

While I believe this is the year Twitter will boost even further into mainstream it is my further observation that Social Optimization and Brand Management have pushed their ways into the algorithms.  Now it is GOogle (and SE’s) responsibility to weight their influence accordingly, and not merely by correlation of product/service.

New Years just days away.  My own personal resolutions are to listen to more Neil Young, spend time with the family taking in more culture and to write more songs.  Search Engine Optimization work will always be at the forefront of my daily activities.  Included in my previous posts were SEO recaps of 2011 as well as forecasts for 2012, here are some additional expectations as the years comes to a close.  Noting that the speed of change within Internet marketing is increasingly dynamic at this point.

TWITTER
If it hasn’t bee apparent as of yet, the Twitter platform is increasingly strong and finding ways to monetize itself without intruding itself on its users.  The fresh design that came late this year focused heavy on usability and is a strong mobile and desktop experience.  Marketers will continue to target audiences immediately with tweets at trends, seasonality and use it for networking.

VIDEO
Moving past youTube, 2012 will bring a strong push into video SEO as internet video becomes a leading medium.  Over 85% of internet users view videos online according to comScore.  YouTube captured 162 million viewers in August of 2011 (more than all of Reality TV from 10 major networks – 56% market share, only 105 million viewers).  Interestingly enough, VEVO becomes the leader online for credible music videos - maintaining an art form almost discarded.

MOBILE
Yes, again – Mobile will be even stronger than this past year.  Especially within the local SEO segment considering most mobile queries are with local intent in mind.  Get your site a mobile version, ASAP – its quite simple.  Consider all major devices for compatibility and remember, speed is important.   But more importantly, if you are ECOM, expect to see more and more sales direct from mobile devices this year.  It’s time to take a look at trustmarks and mobile conversion as well as bounce rates/CTR on mobile devices.

PRIVACY
2011 was attacked by the fluffy WWF Panda all year with an expectation of more content protection as noted within the most recent Author notes.  So, fair or not we can expect Matt Cutts and the Google Spam team to continue to bring us “updates” to the algorithm as early as Q1 in 2012.  Duplicate content, trustworthy sites and brand awareness, all of which being affected by Google’s social platform and the pending implications and Senators call for Anti-Trust argument will lead to further dialogue quickly next year.

HTML5, SCHEMA.ORG & RICH SNIPPETS
Developers can expect to get some use of the advancements within HTML5 (hey, let’s start using multiple H1′s and article tags) to tell bots exactly what sections of pages are about, as well as the entire page as a whole, with more definitive results.  While Schema.org has seen some discussion it hasn’t transferred into much actionable work within sites.  Expectations for further work in OGP and Schema will be the forefront of many developers conferences.  As noted by Google as of late 2011, Rich Snippets are there to show visitors additional data on result pages.  SEO’s using “fake snippets” may face penalization within 2012 with a quick flick of a switch.

Do I expect the end of the world in December of 2012?  Will Hilary run instead of Obama?  Not a chance.  I expect some hot queries though.  Please have a safe and happy New Years and good luck in 2012.