Looking back at last years search engine marketing activity I have listed a number of trends to summarise how things are looking to head in the coming year, of 2007.

1. Usability and will become increasingly important for natural search .

A major part of the process of SEO focus will shift towards website functionality and usability for two reasons for 2 reasons;

First, search engine algorithms are increasingly taking user-experience into consideration when calculating ranking.

Secondly, mainstream advertisers are moving back towards SEO but those advertisers will require something stronger than Top10 placements to justify spending money on the mysterious marketing miracle SEO represents. When an SEO can tell his or her clients they will not only get strong placements but will also get a website redeveloped specifically to increase conversions, that SEO will make more sales.

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Check out the new Amazon service: www.nownow.com

This is another way to get an answer to that question that has been keeping you up all night, or you have been trying to type into a Google web search.

NowNow is in beta at the moment, which means it is inviting a limited number of people to test the service.

When fully launched it aims to be another service provider in alternative search engines. Another company trying to get some of the market share back from Google.

Heres what they all do:

Yahoo Answers allows you to submit a question to a community of other members who answer the question.

Google mobile allows you to text the location or business you want from your mobile handset, which is then delivered back to your handset by SMS.

Amazon NowNow will email you 3 answers to your question.

NowNow certainly looks like a good idea, its similar to Google in answering your question automatically after a short while.

I prefer this way as you can just sit back and wait for the answer to come to you.

Where as with Yahoo you may have to wait hours rather than minutes for a human to answer your query.

I like it now wheres my invite?

Here are just a few of the recent and imminent releases that are worth checking out:

• Firefox 2
• Flash Player 9 for Linux
• Groovy 1.0
• Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7) in Windows Vista
• Java Standard Edition 6
• .NET Framework 3.0
• Ruby on Rails 1.2
• and an endless variety of open source frameworks (dojo) and libraries for both the client and the server

But the one release that’s exciting as a web developer right now is Firebug 1.0 Beta.