When it comes to SEO, keeping ahead of the game and second guessing what Google is going to do next is one of the most important things you can do to ensure success. The difficulty with SEO is that it is based purely on the way that Google operates – and Google is constantly changing the way it does that.

In other words then, what was once a great way to get people to visit your site and increase your visibility can quickly become an obsolete method, or even a damaging one that will actually negatively affect your rankings. This is why it’s so important to make sure that you not only respond to all of Google’s changes, but also try to second guess them and anticipate what is going to be Google’s next move at any given point.

And if you think logically then it’s fairly easy to hazard some probably-accurate guesses as to where Google is likely to head in the near future. Of course Google want to improve their service and to get generally better, so we can expect that over time they will make Google more and more advanced in order to please the end user. At the same time it’s fair to say that Google is going to try to become more intuitive and simple to use, so again the changes are likely to push Google in this direction. If you were coding Google and you had billions of dollars and a team of coding experts… what would you do? Here are some changes we are likely to see.

Greater Integration of Social

This is something we are already seeing with Google Plus, but it’s probably safe to presume that over time social cues are going to play a bigger and bigger role in the way that Google assesses a site. Imagine a world where the more +1s a page gets, the higher it climbs up the rankings. Well this is very likely to happen so if you aren’t already using Google+ then you should get on it now.

Goodbye Keywords, Hello Synonyms

Keywords have been the all important indicator for Google for some time, and Google can use this to look for exact matches between what someone is looking for and the content of a website. However exact matches are easy to spam and they aren’t very intuitive for users. Google has been chatting a lot about ‘semantic’ search recently where they hope to get more of an ‘understanding’ of what people want almost like AI rather than just looking for those matches, which is why synonyms are likely to become more and more important over time.

The End of Bad Spellers

If Google really wants to get rid of spam, then really they should start targeting poor spelling. Of course poor spelling already affects your SEO as it means you have less content that will match the search terms (as Google now corrects misspellings). However I predict this is likely to become even more prominent to the point where Google actually penalizes people for bad grammar etc. Mark my words!

Dates

If I had to make one complaint about the current state of Google it’s that half the information it pulls up is irrelevant. Trying to find out recently whether iPhone still didn’t support Flash (I don’t own one) was a nightmare as all the top results I kept getting were from 2010 and prior. If I’ve noticed this then no doubt Google’s technicians have too, so it’s probably not going to be long before they do something about it.

This guest post was written by SEO, link building expert and webmaster Robin Gupta. Robin has written many posts related to Google algorithm changes and SEO predictions.

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