Greenlight's prediction on search future pans out

“Having pledged 5-10% of its operating profits (US$22.5bn in 2008) (about R172.28bn) to promoting Bing over the next five years, Microsoft has a good chance of increasing Bing's market share over the next year, much as it has in the US,” says Adam Bunn, head of SEO at Greenlight. “That could make ‘Microhoo' worth paying much more attention to from an SEO perspective.” The company said it expected other countries to follow suit, paving the way to integration before the year is out.

Other nine predictions

• Investment into ‘TwitFaceSpace' will continue to rise;
  
• Google's Twitter integration will change fundamentally;
  
• Google factors the content of videos into page relevancy scores;
  
• Internet use on mobile phones will accelerate and mobile search will take off;
  
• Google will find more ways to monetise the excess inventory in AdWords;
  
• Winning the click will be more important than ever;
  
• There will be increased spends across Google's contextual network;
  
• Latency becomes part of the Google algorithm;
  
• Domain structure will play a bigger role for paid search.

Bunn is a search professional with a total of six years SEO experience behind him and oversees natural search strategies for a number of the company's key clients, such as Vodafone UK and British Gas. He regularly provides innovative thought leadership pieces, white papers and opinion pieces for trade publications including Econsultancy, UTalkMarketing and Tech Weekly.