2009 is going to be about making money. Search engines as well as online advertising is going to change as more people are going to rely on advertising and promoting online to save money. Google’s stock along with both rivals Yahoo and Microsoft are both declining in value with the former still holding 75% of the search engine market firmly in its hand.
Boost in SEO Strategies
Nowadays since the chips are down everyone is striving to save a buck or two. As the price for paid search terms increases more and more businesses will begin to increase their focus on appearing on organic search engine results. SEO consultants and businesses are going to see a rise in their number of clients as more businesses will want to decrease their reliance on PPC advertising.
Most people consider traffic coming from search engines to be free where as it’s not really free given the fact that most websites will really need to go a long way and spend a considerable amount of money just to optimize their websites for a specific keyword. However even though the traffic is not necessarily free but the ROI (return on investment) certainly improves when compared to PPC advertising. 2009 will be the year of organic search marketing as businesses strive to save a buck where ever possible.
Paid Inclusion Might Just take off again
Yahoo.com is the only search engine to offer paid inclusions. The reason paid inclusions are going to take off in 2009 is primarily due to the unique pay per click program that they offer that allows marketers to project their website results directly into organic search listings. Since organic search is becoming ever so popular marketers will definitely try to get on those organic listings.
I however see one major drawback to this type of advertising and that is the reliability of the search itself. People will probably stop using a search engine if all they get are irrelevant websites that don’t answer their questions but just advertise. People are not exactly looking for squeeze pages or landing pages when they are searching for something.
Video Marketing
In 2009 more people will opt to download videos from the internet to learn various things such as web designing, Photoshop, SEO etc. Having said that there are also going to be a large number of free videos offered that rely on advertising and sponsorship.
There is a new video monetizing program that is being developed by two Stanford students that would allow people to easily embed advertisements in their videos. This also offers a great opportunity to advertisers as well as video makers who up to now have had less to gain except for getting more traffic to their website by posting videos to video sharing websites.
