So it is that time of year again to start putting together 2009 "lists". We'll leave the best songs and movies to the entertainment world. But I always find it interesting to see what end of year posts other Online Marketers publish. There are plenty of 'best articles' and '2010 predictions' out there. So it seems a good time to just recap a few of the interesting things we saw and experienced here at UpWord in 2009:

• SEO Popularity: We saw an increased "interest" in SEO. Not only from a sales perspective but even existing clients. I think this is due to a combination of the maturation of SEO as it becomes a standard line item in many company's budgets, but also the economy making people consider how they can control their SEM budgets. With this increased interest we have seen SEO opportunities grow in that clients are now becoming more open to SEO recommendations and more active in implementing those recommendations.
• Personalized Search Results: This has been happening for some time now but we really saw personalization of results increase in 2009. Although this may make it hard to show clients where they rank (we focus more on traffic and conversion anyway), personalized results are good for the industry. As people have other options of finding information- facebook, rss readers, etc., it is good to see search engines continue to strive towards providing each one of us with the results we are looking for.
• Market Share: Published figures from research companies finally put Google over 70% market share in the U.S. For most clients this has been the case as far as percentage of referrals for some time. We saw a nice increase in BING referrals after the initial launch followed by a plateau and drop, nice thing though is that the "drop" levels are still higher than the pre-launch levels. I could be wrong but just based off personal analysis it may appear Yahoo is losing more market share than the research companies are reporting?
• Merging of SEO and SMO: Internally we have had many conversations on whether "social media" should be run by Search companies or departments. There are many synergies  but also there are different skills needed to manage both properly. Search engines have always had a sweet spot for ranking blogs, but in 2009 we saw an increase in non-traditional web content appearing in the SERPs- social media profiles, videos, news items, etc. As social media content continues to appear in the organic search results you will see more of a need to merge Social Media efforts with SEO efforts.
• Size of Index vs. Freshness of Index: Google and Yahoo used to conduct a Press Release battle over who had more pages in their index. One day Google would say they had X billion then Yahoo would say X+1. Back and forth. Until finally they both stopped and correctly shifted the conversation to "quality of index". Always wondered if some sort of gentleman's agreement ended that PR battle. In 2009 we now have 3 players battling and they all within days of each other announced deals or inclusion of Facebook and Twitter results to improve the timeliness of the results. We'll see. Just because info is fresh doesn't always mean its good.
• Paid Search Quality: Quality score has been around now long enough that it is not a new concept, so its good to see people realize the importance of SEO skills when managing SEM campaigns. Quality score is a good thing for SEM. To go off on a loosely related tangent as far as 'quality', I thought by now there would be a more well defined or even regulated Copyright policy, but we still see some ad copy get approved, some not, and some with "limited" approval when promoting or discussing other companies products.
• Mobile Search: I have been hearing about how we would be using the internet on our cell phones since 1999-2000 when I worked in the dot-com boom/bubble/party. Its finally here. I think this year more than any other mobile internet really started its exponential growth curve not just in usage but in applications, ease of use, and quality of use.