10 Web Trend Predictions for 2010 (Part 2)

We're now in February, which has given me a chance to reflect back at the end of 2009, beginning of 2010 and what I foresee for the remainder of the year and beyond. Below are my top 10 predictions for web trends on the rise for the remainder of the 2010. None of these predictions are earth-shattering, but that doesn't make them any less important.

Continued...

6. Increased usage of custom font embedding.  There won't be a big visual change with this one, but what will improve is searchability of sites.  Web sites by default only allow for a handful of web-safe fonts.  To achieve creative designs, the fonts designers wanted to use would just be put into graphics, with the down side being graphics are not searchable.  That's starting to change as newer technologies are allowing for the insertion of rich typography without sacrificing search engine friendliness.
    
7. Traditional advertising will continue to lose ground.  That may be another no-brainer.  It's interesting to visually see where that is happening though.  See the chart below.  Pay particular attention to the ground continuing to be lost by the Yellow Pages.
   
   
   
8. Conversion rate optimization will gain more attention.  We've known for years the value of tracking web statistics.  With so many free options out there (i.e. Google Analytics), the percentage of sites tracking results has gone through the roof.  What still lacks is organizations looking at this data and actually doing something with it.  With the increase of social media platforms and the importance of getting return on the online marketing dollars being spent, I see there being a major increase in the attention conversion rates found in the web statistics get.
    
9. Google will continue to increase ranking importance on Facebook and Twitter activity.  Google, as well as others like Bing, are constantly evolving their search algorithms.  Google has already started to place importance on social media usage, but there is still a ways to go.  The challenge is recognizing the significance of real-time media while filtering out the noise and junk information that gets posted every second of the day.
    
10. Google will start indexing and evaluating sites quicker.  Google still has on their website they take several weeks to index new pages for search engine results.  As the web goes more real-time, search engines need to keep up.  It's not quite that simple though.  As mentioned in the previous paragraph, there is a lot of information out there and the potential to sacrifice quality for time relevant results.  Search engine results will do us little good if you will need to click through thirty different results to find something that relates to what you are looking for.  The advent of personalized searching may play a big part in this.  If searches can start to determine how you personally like to search, they can start to overcome this obstacle.  Therein lays one of the biggest factors about who will dominate the search world in the next couple years.  Whomever figures it out first (and best) will have a huge advantage.
    

If you're interested in reading Predictions 1-5, please refer to Part 1 of this article. 

Posted February 8, 2010 | Read all posts by Ryan Deyer