We are already well on our way into January and need to make sure our SEO and marketing strategies are suitable for the new year. There are already plenty of SEO predictions 2012 being discussed across forums and blogs, and considering the latest updates to the search engines, it is a good idea to keep them in mind when planning and conceptualising campaigns for the upcoming year. We take a look at the top predictions that your SEO agency needs to think about for 2012.

1. Fresh, Relevant and Enticing Content

Regardless of how exhausted the poor Panda may be, Google is almost certainly going to continue its focus on providing good quality and relevant search results by penalising sites with duplicate or low quality content. So the first of the SEO predictions for 2012 is that more emphasis will be placed on new and relevant content.

The fight between PageRank and BrowseRank has been an ongoing one for some time now. Everybody has a different opinion about which one is better and which one is more trustworthy. I want to cover the different factors each one of these tools take into account when ranking websites and why everyone thinks that BrowseRank is going to take over from PageRank.

There are three factors that I want to be point out for BrowseRank. One of the major differences between PageRank and BrowseRank is that PR uses a link graph in order to determine a website’s importance. In other words, they check how many inbound links a site has and what kind of sites these links are coming from. This is a problem when spammers come in to play because they create automated links from a large number of websites. These links are all calculated in the page’s PR and it leaves the user thinking that a page is important when it really is not. BrowseRank, on the other hand, does not have this problem because inbound links are not the most important factor when determining a page’s importance. So, basically, spam will not affect BrowseRank in any way. Another thing BrowseRank can check is whether users arrive at a page from a URL input or via a link on a different page.

Many of us in the search industry already know that rankings are not the be all and end all, yet there are still so many people out there who are fixated on keyword rankings or that trophy phrase. I’m sure we have all seen the occasional article or blog post along these lines in the past; however, this topic gained renewed vigor last week after a presentation by Bruce Clay in which he stated “ranking is dead”.

Many people disagree with Bruce Clay’s statement, however, he possibly just used the wrong words at the time. I am in full agreement with what I believe was the true meaning/intention behind what he said. Most of us know that rankings fluctuate on a daily basis; different data centres produce different results, local queries differ from country to country and finally there are all the advances in personalised search.