Have you ever tried to run along the deck of a ship in a storm? I don’t recommend it—between unexpected waves, slippery puddles, and a continuously-moving surface, you’re liable to get hurt. A ship in a storm is a chaotic, ever-shifting ride.

In many ways, Search Engine Optimization is the same way. We’ve mentioned before how search engines and their algorithms are constantly changing, which is why SEO is an ongoing process. But the changes in the realm of the internet aren’t always unpredictable—sometimes, it’s possible to see what’s coming ahead of time. Here’s a few developments that will soon alter how we all market and find information on the internet:

Twitter and Google’s new friendship

A few months ago, Twitter Inc. and Google Inc. struck a deal¹ that will allow Google to index posts from Twitter and show them in Google search results. What does this mean? It means that Tweets are going to be a whole lot more visible to a wide audience—even people who don’t use Twitter will be able to see what’s going on there. So if your apartment community or company maintains a corporate Twitter account, your posts will be a lot more visible. And if you’re not engaging in marketing on Twitter, now may be a good time to start!

Mozilla and Google are taking a break

Mozilla’s Firefox browser² is one of the most popular internet browsers available, partly because it was the first browser to allow users to run internet searches straight from the address bar at the top of the window. And while users can set their menu bar to search using any search engine they want, from Google to Bing and beyond, the default search engine has always been Google. But that has now changed. Mozilla recently announced that they have changed their policies and set Yahoo! as their new default search engine. This has already caused a dramatic increase in Yahoo!’s share of the search engine market. What this means for you is that you shouldn’t neglect Yahoo!’s requirements when you’re doing SEO. If you’re not sure if you’ve been optimizing for Yahoo!, now would be a good time to check.

Google Plus is breaking up

Google’s social network³ has a lot of uses, from making your business more visible to Google’s search engine and maps to helping coordinate your Google accounts across multiple devices. But Google has never been a company to settle for “good enough”—they’re always looking to improve and innovate. That’s why they recently announced that they are breaking Google+ up into two separate entities, each focused on one of the social network’s most successful products. Google Photos and Google Streams will now be taking the place of the social network, one focused on (obviously) image display and storage and the other focused on some of the more business, news, and social aspects of Google+. What does this mean for you? Well, it means that there’s likely to be a bit of upheaval around Google+ for a little while. If you’ve been focused primarily on Plus for your SEO efforts, now might be a good time to strengthen your SEO efforts on other social sites.

By: Christopher Baxter

¹http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-05/twitter-said-to-reach-deal-for-tweets-in-google-search-results

²https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-and-innovation-on-the-web/

³http://www.businessinsider.com/google-plus-broken-up-photos-streams-2015-3