Thursday 23 February 2012

Internet trends for 2012

The battle for peoples' online attention continues unabated. Social media continue to grow in influence, including Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Google+ is growing very rapidly and may well challenge Facebook in due course. Another significant factor is that there is evidence published that Google+ is influencing Google search results.

All of these social media are starting to focus on the commercial sector as well as the end-user. This gives more opportunities for companies to present their products and services. See our social media web page.

Responsive web design is the other key trend. Web traffic is moving onto smartphones and tablets so that web sites need to be delivered on this hardware. Some web applications are now being superceded by phone/tablet applications. Cloud computing enables the user to access data and documents from their mobile device.

Google remains the dominant search engine in the UK for 2012. The 'panda' update in 2011 focussed on quality and content of sites. The 'freshness' update is now looking for more recent information, which implies that sites, however full of content, need to be kep up-to-date with the latest news.

Google is now tending to include local information in results for some searches, if it believes it knows your location. Otherwise the location that Google assumes can give confusing results. All this places growing emphasis on local searches and recommendations on sites such as Qype, Bizwiki and Google Places itself.

As the internet world becomes more competitive it is an absolute requirement to achieve the highest quality.

Here is an interesting article giving the top 15 web trends for 2012.