SEO in 2013: Content, Social Media and What Else?

Drastic changes are expected in the field of SEO in 2014 and you as an internet marketer should be well prepared for the next chapter in the game. In order to make sure you don’t get knocked down, you need updated facts, trend and data on Search Engine Optimization. As most of us are aware, SEO is no more about tactics, but about strategy and there is increasing influence of Web 2.0, content and social media.

Looks like social media is the new place to compete for success. In fact, 43 % of small businesses spend six or more hours for their social media promotion. 56% of companies have successfully acquired customers through their blogs.

SEO is not a one-time process

Many people think of SEO as a one-time magical process that takes their website to the top on search results, that’s plain wrong. SEO is an ongoing process and the Google algorithms are not permanent. The strategies that work today, may be pretty useless tomorrow. It keeps changing as Google works to eliminate spam from their search results.

Search engines are image-blind

Images and flash may be cool, but they are not even readable to the Google bots. They can only read text content on your website and everything else is ignored. If you make a navigation system with just images/flash, you are going to lose the bot’s attention and obviously your rankings. Limit the usage of images and flash to ads alone, and you’re good to go.

Backlinks still work, but only quality ones

Building backlinks is the backbone of optimization and it still works. But as a result of the increasing spam, Google is now immune to low quality spammy backlinks. Links from high quality sites are in more demand now. Google has already introduced a backlink disavow tool to help eradicate low quality backlinks and this also means low quality links are really bad for you.

Black hat techniques are dead

There was a time when literally anyone could make a blog, apply some black hat tactics and rank well in search engines. But those times are changing now and 2013 has seen a better spamfree search experience. It has to be noted that black hat techniques can do more bad to your website rather than good. Google penalizes websites that use black hat tactics and it can be real hard to recover.

Quality content is the evergreen strategy

This one actually goes without saying but a talk about SEO without content being mentioned is incomplete. The increasing number of websites and blogs mean that you have to be better to stand out from the rest. Over three quarters of marketers use content creation as part of their campaign.