Future of SEO
The Future Of SEO
In the world of search engine optimization, 2013 will be a weed-out year. For those who have become accustomed to sub-par SEO techniques, 2013 could potentially be a difficult year to adapt to. As the search engine algorithms update, marketers and webmasters alike are forced to adjust their strategies, getting more creative while continuing to focus on fundamental concepts. These fundamental principles such as quality content and improved user experience will not change, and should still be the basis of your on-site efforts moving forward. One of the significant pillars of success, is forecast… the ability to see things coming. Simply by following trends and using your knowledge and instincts is the best way to gain an edge and stay prepared for all the curve balls this industry has to offer.
What Will The Future Of SEO Hold?
Google Authorship Will Become A Ranking Factor – “Author Rank”
Are you starting to see little faces pop up next to your search results? This means that the article or post was written by a contributing author to that particular website. Authorship will allow Google to follow a single writer across all the properties that they have contributed to. So what is the purpose of this from an SEO point of view? Simple, by tracking the results of each piece of content, Google will be able to issue a “score” to each contributor. This will be factored into Google’s quality score for each page. The end result is a possible impact on rankings. This could also play an integral part in ranking/assessing value to social shares, since those with a higher author rank will tend to have higher influence. More on this later.
Google+ Will (Finally) Become Mainstream
Right now Google+ is still a bit “techie” if you will, meaning most of the people who are on it are professionals who work in (or somehow related to) the computer, technology, internet sector. But this will soon change over the course of 2013. The internet, as a whole is becoming more social. Google waking up to that reality of a social web, and Google+ embodies this new kind of internet. On Facebook – we like. On Twitter – we tweet and retweet. On Pinterest – we pin. On Reddit – we… waste time. However sharing and liking and so forth have become the primary way people collect and distribute information. Search is still a big part of the equation, but social is getting bigger. Google+ ties all of these elements together. In December 2012, 135 million active users checked their Google+ streams each month, up from 100 million in mid-September. If you do the math, that means Google+ is now growing at the same pace as Facebook when it was similarly sized. Interesting… Google+ is powerful, and it only stands to gain ground. Google has really given their “Plus” button a big advantage when it comes to their own ranking factors. As proprietary as this may seem… it’s Google – and they have (and always will have) full control. You either join the Google+ club or you simply lose one precious ranking factor. Your choice.
Stronger Focus On Links Over Time
By now it should be no secret that SEO is changing. In todays world, if a competitor has thousands of links and your little website has only a hundred, you can still outrank them! If your quality is better, and if you’re growing organically over time. Remember the old fable about the tortoise and the hare – slow and steady wins the race. Aim for quality and not for speed. It’s important to think about what is natural. If a website or brand is growing over time, gradually more and more people are going to link to it, slowly at first and gradually increasing over time.
Link Building Follows The Law Of Diminishing Returns
Remember this as you are growing your link profile. The more links you get from a single domain, the more and more each subsequent link diminishes. Personally, I feel you don’t need more than two or three. I actually recommend just going for one link per website. When building links this is important to remember. For the average webmaster, this can be quite difficult to track. This is why it is always best to consult an SEO Professional before looking to manually expand your link profile. This leads perfectly into the next major prediction for the future of SEO below.
Stricter Penalty For Aggressive Link Building
Many clients ask “how come my site penalized but my competitor’s site was left unscathed?” A penalty basically means an arbitrary line was drawn in the algorithm and you were on the wrong side of it. With future updates, the line may move and hit your competitor’s site too. Although not the most comforting thing to hear, its the closest explanation I can give to relate to the truth. 2012 was a brutal year for link-building penalties, and 2013 doesn’t appear to be any different. Penguin focused on penalizing specific types of spam., particularly dealing with anchor text “over-optimization”. My prediction is that Google will continue to penalize sites that build links in an unnatural fashion. Examples of this include strange patterns of link acquisition - i.e zero links for a week, 100 links for a day, zero links for another few days, followed by another 20 links. Link acquisition should resemble a calm wave, with gradual increases and slow decreases.
Quick Recap: Penguin vs. Panda
Penguin (Penalty)
1. Aggressive exact-match anchor text
2. Overuse of exact-match domains
3. Low-quality article marketing & blog spam
4. Stuffing of Keywords in internal/outbound links
Penguin focused on penalizing specific types of spam., particularly dealing with anchor text “over-optimization”.
Panda (Update)
This update (not penalty) was designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. The overall goal was to provide better rankings for high-quality sites, you know… the sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.
Social Shares (or lack thereof) Becoming A Ranking Factor
Social Shares are important to any website that desires attention and traffic. Although Google’s Algorithm is still somewhat mysterious in terms of social shares, we can imply a few reasonable ideas. The first, and most glaring, concept is the amount of social shares compared to your sites actual traffic. This correlation needs to seem relatively even amongst the two. For example, if your domain attracts over 5,000+ views per month but only has 10-20 total likes/shares/re-pins/tweets/etc… Then clearly, something isn’t adding up. On the flip side, if you have over 10,000 people following your site through the combined social media networks, you surely better have the traffic to back up those figures. At the end of the day, 10k+ followers and only 100 views per month on your site means one of two things. First, your “followers” are robots OR the on-site content/user experience is so awful that people refuse to browse the domain. Either way, Social Shares–or lack thereof–is quickly becoming a factor when devising any SEO effort. Remember folks, the only constant is change!
This article was written by P.J. Leimgruber – Co-Founder and President of Rank Executives.
