6 Ways SEO Will Change in 2013

Considering the shifts in SEO survival, 2012 has been quite an eventful year. There have been several important updates that have changed the search scene altogether.

A massive crackdown on spam sites through the EMD updates was not the only scathing step taken by Google. Google updates its algorithm over 500 times a year in order to weed out low quality sites from the top positions. Google will never stop its relentless run to make search results more relevant.

Search engine optimization, as it stands today, is no longer child’s play. It has become quite challenging and innovative strategies are required to attain better rankings.

So what is the outlook for SEO in 2013? The answer to this question is still vague, as people are not sure about the updates that are to occur in 2013. Fierce arguments are still raging regarding the Google updates that may take place. While some believe that the future lies in content marketing, others believe that social media presence will be the key. Others continue to resort to blackhat SEO methods that may land them on Google’s hitlist.

Based on what I hear people saying and see people doing, and my understanding of the proposed Google updates that may take place, here is a list of major changes in SEO you can expect to occur in 2013.

Author Rank

How Google handles Author Rank will be the biggest search factor in 2013. It may turn the entire internet marketing world upside down.

Google will assign each blogger an Author Rank based on various parameters such as niche authority and domain expertise. This Rank will be given a major role in ranking the content authored by that author. Simply speaking, the higher the rank and reputation of the author, the higher are the chances of their content ranking well in search engines. Also, an author’s published content will be directly linked to their Google+ profile, thereby drawing Google+ into SEO calculations. So, with the mooted Author Rank update, performance of a site will depend more upon the reputation and niche expertise of the content’s author in social networks.

Equivalency Score Algorithm

Another major update that is expected to take place in 2013 is the Google Equivalency Score Algorithm (ESA). ESA is expected to work in the same way as Google Adword’s Quality Score where each keyword is given a point score based on several factors. The quality score of the keywords is then used along with the bid amount of the advertiser and the ads are ranked accordingly. ESA, if operationalized, will have a huge impact on online businesses. It will effectively cut down the monopoly of some websites on number one rankings and will create a more level playing field for all businesses. One effect of this is that Google may display the same results for a search query in different orders each time the results appear on screen.

Link Disavow Tool

The Link Disavow Tool was created to collect data on the backlink structure of sites. Chances are that Google will use this tool in 2013 to create an algorithm using the links that have already been submitted to them. The tool will be used to improve reporting of spam sites and poor quality backlinks. Consequently, blog posts and forum posts can no longer be used to create backlinks.

Social media presence

SEO in 2013 will be heavily influenced by the numerous social networks and the development and utilisation of an effective social media presence. Site owners and technicians have to carve a niche out for themselves in social media if they want their sites to do well in search rankings. Sharing of content on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Delicious, LinkedIn, MySpace and Google+ will be of the utmost importance. Social media popularity will, in a way, decide the fate of a site as far as Google is concerned.

The reason Google gives such importance to the social media presence of a site is yet to be definitively ascertained. But there are many theories out there regarding this. Social media presence is proof that the traffic finds the content of a site useful. However, many say that Google will do this to give its staggering Google+ a boost. Many believe that in the days to come, Google+ might just emerge as the most important social network for webmasters.

Digital marketing

Digital marketing will also play a big role in 2013. Digital marketing will slowly include the entire spectrum of online marketing from market-purposed content creation, through pay-per-click strategies, to use of social media. Because of certain expected Google updates, this will get a big boost and chances are that more and more brands will come into the digital marketing field in time.

No Fundamental Changes in SEO

Having started by explaining how SEO will fundamentally change in 2013, let me close by saying that the foundation of SEO is going to remain the same. Whether web owners and professionals like it or not, content will continue as the king online. High quality, well-written, expertly displayed, functionally useful content will still hold the key to ranking well for target search terms. Any site needs to have compelling and unique content that has good readability and provides a rich user experience. Half the search battle is won if a website follows this cardinal rule, and that will only become more true in 2013 and beyond.

Currently accepted link building practices such as viral article submission and automated link posting won’t work any more, as the basis for them affecting search results is revealed as artifical. Google began the tough scrutiny of backlinks in 2012, and this will continue in 2013.

While we must wait to see just how Google and other search giants implement their strategies for 2013, it can be taken for granted that their efforts to keep search results organically honest, relevant and useful to consumer will have an impact on the industry that has developed around search engine optimization. Whether the effects of that are good or bad, for consumers and the industry, remains to be seen.

What about you? Are you ready for 2013? Do you foresee other ways in which search will change next year and beyond?

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Penguin 2.0 SEO Update - Google Updates Things Again!

So, the news is out – the Google update being named as Penguin 2.0 has been rolled out. In this blog post, let me give you some background to Penguin and tips on how you can cope with it to make sure your site doesn’t suffer.

Yesterday, Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google announced on his blog:

“We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.

This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally.” 

What does Penguin 2.0 mean for you?

If you are following the guidelines set by Google with regards to their steps they outline about rewarding high quality sites, the clues are all there. Build your site into a clear AUTHORITY for the niche or industry you are in, look to encourage bookmarking and SOCIAL SHARING of your content and look to AVOID WEBSPAM techniques to automate 1000’s of links being added to the internet pointing to your site.

Ranking results achieved by clients of HodgesNet will have seen in our monthly reporting, positions of their sites fluctuate in the results pages in recent months due to the many updates that Google are rolling out, but the majority of sites are seeing that the content-led and content outreach focussed SEO strategies have seen an increase in referral traffic and rankings increase.

We are still monitoring the changes to this update from yesterday, but we anticipate that the white-hat techniques and content-led strategies will not affect sites that we are working on in a negative way. From reports, the number of search queries affected by the Penguin updates since it’s birth have been:

- Penguin update 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)

- Penguin update 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)

- Penguin update 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)

- Penguin update 4 (Penguin 2.0) on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)

This shows that the latest round of updates is affecting quote a large number of search queries. It will be interesting to see how this affect low quality sites with poor content.

How do you ensure you are doing things in line with the Penguin 2.0 update?

Here are 7 things to make sure you are active in doing:

1 - Get your on-page content nailed down and perfect so that each page is relevant to one search term or keyword. 

2 - Add fresh regular content (blogging) on your site every week to become a source of knowledge and authority in your niche and industry.

3 - Curate content from other site such as YouTube and news sites by including content and embedding video to make your blog article more interesting.

4 - Have social sharing and social bookmarking buttons on your pages and blog posts to make it easy for your website visitors to share your awesome content.

5 - Reach out to relevant blogs and other authority sites to provide them with content for their audience in return for a link back to your site.

6 - List your website in niche and industry specific directories.

7 - Write and publish articles and online PR for greater reach.

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Top 21 SEO Tips and Tricks to Follow in 2013

Google says on the record, “Don’t write for Search Engines, Write for your readers/audience/users.” While this may sound ridiculous, there are plenty of reasons to follow the advice. More often, newbie falls in the trap and often gets confused where to start from. Don’t sound to be too harsh, but do not always listen to almighty Google.

We (bloggers & web entrepreneurs) are mere small creatures and we must write for our readers/users while keeping search engine behavior at the corner of our brain! Producing great content that reader’s love is something not everyone’s cup of team. So how would you start your venture in 2013? What are the best SEO practices that you should follow? Without further ado, let me present you top 20 SEO Tips for 2013.

Excellent SEO Tips To Follow in 2013

I have used an adjective here – Special. These tips are special not because they are something that you have never heard of, but they are special as you have not understood these basic ones quite effectively!

Keyword Analysis inclusive of Competition Analysis

1. Determine Strategy for Keywords

This must be your first and foremost step. You should be clear with your goals that what keywords you want to play around with. This depends on what you want to gain by your online presence and venture. The question in the previous sentence can be answered with information regarding your target audience.

It may look like a flow chart or catch 22 for you, don’t worry, you are right and it is so. We have solutions for it. You can use certain keyword tools like www.keywordspy.com, www.spyfu.com, www.ispionage.com and www.compete.com. In order to get complete market scenario you must look at your competitor’s website. You can enter that website’s URL to any of the mentioned tools and get an estimation of competition.

2. List The Potential Keywords

You have now, different results from different tools as all of them use different methodology. You can collaborate all the results depending on your common analytical sense and list out 50-100 potential keywords. Create an MS Excel sheet for these Keywords.

3. Check Competition of Keywords

Keyword competition is something most newbies/expert ignores. While sorting out bunch of keywords from Google adword keywords tool is the first step to follow, people often forget that the checking Keyword competition is equally important. There are plenty of tools available out there, but we recommend to try out tools like Traffictravis first.

Later, you can go for the premium tools like SEOMoz keyword difficulty and SERPIQ keyword competition analysis tool. Both the tools delivers the great result and cut down considerable work required in doing competition analysis as well as keyword competition analysis.

On Page SEO Tips

4. HTML

Use a content management service such as WordPress, Blogger or Drupal and optimize your HTML tags with the keywords. Make sure you also maintain text to HTML ratio. Always try to keep the ratio high so that Google can understand your content better.

5. Title

Keep the character count under 70 and preferably under 66. Use various plugins available for various content management platforms for SEO. The WordPress beginners should start with WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to make on page SEO as much better as they can. There are also many third-party paid options available in the market, but we do not recommend using them.

6. Meta Tags & Description

Your keyword must be there in your Meta tag and description. Your meta description must be in the vicinity of 157 characters. This is most important as Search Engines read meta description for understanding the post content.

7. URL and/or Permalinks

Your page URL must contain your key word or keyword phrase. If it is a phrase, words must be separated by hyphens. Use some plugins to remove stop words from the URL/permalinks. It’s always good to minimize the use of STOP word in the permalink

8. First Paragraph

While this is not necessary a big factor in ranking, try to include important keyword in first paragraph, so Google can clearly understand what the topic is about. While there is no hard and fast rule, make sure you include primary keyword within first few words of the article.

9. Content Length

As per Guidelines provide by Google, the length of your content must be more than 300 words. We advise you to write content with word count above 500 words. (It will help to protect you from “Animal Hit”). However, we recommend to go over 600-700 mark whenever possible. Instead of writing a simple post without proper information, you should focus your energy to provide quality content with necessary bullet point and images to back-up what you say.

10. Content Quality

Your content must be unique. Thinly copied contents are also getting Panda Hit nowadays so stay away from copy and plagiarism. Make sure you follow proper internal linking strategy without over optimizing anchor text.

11. Keyword Density

Keyword density must be between 2-4%. It means your keyword must not be repeated more than twice or thrice in each 100 words block so if your are writing a 500 words post your keyword count must not exceed 10-15 repetitions. If it does, then Google will count it as over optimization.

12. Image Optimization

Optimize Image ALT tag with your keyword. It is always a good idea to save the image name with the keyword and upload them on the server with the same name. Also attach necessary ALT tag to the image, so Google can understand what the image depicts. Remember, Google is blind, and you need to supply information to Google to understand the image. Moreover, try to provide a wrap up text to explain what the image is all about. This will increase the relevancy as well.

Sitemap

13. Sitemap Submission

Submit your site to the major search engines. Create an XML site map and make sure the search engines can find your site map. Use Google’s webmaster’s tools to verify your sitemap is being read correctly: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

14. HTML Sitemap

Creating an HTML sitemap is an essential part of your SEO endeavors. This confirms you that search engine crawlers are crawling the site properly.

Back-End

15. Avoid DHTML and Excessive HTML

Search Engines can’t read DHTML menus quite easily, so avoid them in your menu. Also, try to maintain HTML to text ratio. Having too many HTML makes the ratio high which is often undesired. Make sure you provided meaningful insight in each and every paragraph and/or article by providing more text.

16. Avoid Major Content in PDF or Flash

Publish your content in HTML format instead of Adobe PDF and Flash. Valuable content that is locked in these formats cannot be easily crawled and indexed.

17. Robots.txt

Make sure your robots.txt file is configured correctly to include and exclude the appropriate directories and files on your website. This file instructs search engines that which portion of your site is not accessible to search engines. Often people misunderstands this concepts which results in duplicate content or the description is unavailable due to robots.txt configuration.

Off Page Optimization

18. Use Social Media Effectively

Market your content on various social networks and media. Try various titles and descriptions that can engage users with your online venture. Initially, target twitter, Facebook, Google+, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn and Reddit. Google is now giving more importance to social media signals to rank website. Now is the time to utilize social media platform and turn the tale in your favor.

19. Generate Quality Backlinks

There are various techniques to generate backlinks. Guest post on other high authority site from same niche, Commenting on the posts related to your site content, Forum Posting and many more techniques are there which should be used moderetly to gain more trust. Well, backlink is itself a big chapter and can cover tons of pages, but we do not want to go that route for the moment.

Please note that Google introduced an update called Penguin to penalize the overly optimized sites, which means that those sites which are having spam backlinks and using black hat backlink techniques.  I will explain you in detail  how it will identify the spammers, see if there is a site on Diabetes (Health Niche) and the site site owner purchased a bulk of backlinks for the anchor text “diabetes symptoms in children” to rank for that keyword.

This can get a red flag and can get  penalty because if that is a genuine quality site/article then there should be lot of variations in the anchor test linking to that particular page, because it is a common sense that not everybody in the world will link to the exact anchor text right ?  … Yes, that is not at all possible  because they may link to that via various anchor texts like

• diabetes signs and symptoms in children
• diabetes in children
• children and diabetes : signs and symptoms
• what are the symptoms in children with type 2 diabetes
• type 1 diabetes symptoms in children and adults

People (SEOs) even identified alternatives for this as well to spam Google which I am not interested in discussing publicly and if you are interested in knowing them then you can contact me 

Analysis

20. Use Google Analytics

Install Google Analytics on your website.( http://www.google.com/analytics/ )If you’ve already done this, use the data from: Traffic Sources > Keywords to find additional keywords you may want to optimize.

21. Keyword tracking

Tracking your major campaign and keywords in the Google will give you a clear information about your efforts. It’s therefore very necessary to keep track of all your keyword ranking. For this purpose, you can use free and paid tools available online. Even, you can manually track the keyword in the Google. We recommend to use “whatsmyserp.com” or similar service to check your keyword ranking.

Hopefully, the above SEO tips will help you to start your venture in 2013. Make sure you follow each and every one of them closely.

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Difference between Google Panda and Google Penguin

For those who deal with SEO and blogging, Google panda and Google penguin should not be something new to them. Ever since these updates were introduced, there has been strong buzz on how to develop the perfect search engine optimization plan, so that websites have their dues in rankings. Moving forward, here is a close take Panda and penguin, the two most discussed Google updates, and the difference between the two.

What is Google Panda

Google launched Panda in February 2011, mainly as a change in its search results ranking algorithm. The main purpose of the update was just to keep those low quality and low content sites away from the top ranking results and give the actual quality sites their due.

As an obvious result, many websites with huge amount of advertising, or those with low quality content, saw a huge decline in the rankings. Ever since Panda was launched, there have been many updates to it ranging to over 22 in total.

What is Google Penguin

Another algorithm update from Google that gave SEO experts another blow was Penguin that was launched in April 2012. The idea underlying the update was simple enough- penalize and decrease the rankings of sites that breach Google’s Webmaster Guidelines set the by the search engine.

This included lowering the search engine rankings of all those sites that practice black-hat SEO techniques like duplicate content, keyword stuffing and cloaking to name a few.

Google Panda Vs Google Penguin

Attributes	Google Panda	Google Penguin
The Idea	Penalize websites of low quality and those with low quality content.It is first introduced in 24thFebruary, 2011 with the name of Farmer Update in USA.	Bring down websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and use  black-hat SEO techniques
Date of First update	February 2011	April 2012
Also Known as	Farmer Update	Over Optimization Penalty.
Number of updates	Panda had over 24updates till March 2013, last being on Jan 22, 2013.	Penguin had just three updates since its launch in April last year.
Purpose	Bring the high quality and content sites on the top of search engine rankings	Bring the high quality and content sites on the top of search engine rankings
Surviving the algorithm change	There are no two ways about surviving Panda than to make an update in the website and get rid of all those low quality pages, content and keywords. Over-optimized pages need to be checked. Websites that have been hit by Panda need to work on brand awareness and social media networks in a new campaign. The webpage(s) that have been affected need to be isolated from those that weren’t harmed.	Black hat SEO techniques need to be abolished because Penguin is smart enough to deal with all websites indulging in these practices. Avoid excessive link building, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, and meaningless and irrelevant content. Creating content for other blogs and websites and socializing content. Relevant use of keywords and absolute refrain from all kinds of stuffing.
Google released any tool to recover ?	NO	Google introduced A new tool called “disavow links tool” – see the Google webmaster central blogpost
Recovery choices for websites	Panda is basically an on-page problem, so the main changes need to be on the website. Check for pages with no or little content, as well as, for plagiarism. Creating elaborative pages with FAQs and more for a website should help.	Check for the links to find if there are from the same domain name or IP address, so that links don’t look like purchased. The links should not just be direct links to the website, because websites that have followed such polices have seen dip in the rankings. Disavow tool can be helpful in getting rid of too many links that are just associated with the keywords. Penguin genuinely focuses on penalizing unnatural links that are causing changes in the search results intentionally.
How do The algorithms affect a site?	It is possible that an entire site is affected through panda. Usually single pages of a website are not targeted in the algorithm. Panda doesn’t look for think contents but the overall content, so in websites where little original content and more duplicate or thin contents are present, those are likely to be fully penalized.	Penguin generally affects one part of the website on a page and keyword level. Unless spammed for too much keyword usage on the entire, Penguin doesn’t damage the entire site.
Does a recovery request help?	No, because the changes are overall.	No, unless a manual warning is issued, and even in such warnings, recovering is next to impossible.
Does manual removal of links needed?	No, because content is more important here.	If time permits and one wants to avoid relying totally on Disavow tool, then definitely manual link removal is helpful.
By when sites can recover?	If the duplicate and thin content has been done away with, then probably by the next refresh.	Should take time in recovering as refreshing is not frequent. Google has announced an update but with no date specified.
Detailed tips and tricks to recover	Tips to recover from Google panda	Tips to recover from Google penguin
When is the next update ?	No idea	4th penguin update going to happen soon in the month of May, 2013. source : Matt Cutts Twitter

Even though the magnitude of the updates seems to be low in comparison to the results they generated, there is no denying that SEO experts and webmasters have a lot to cope with. With content getting the topmost priority, there is no possibility of any kind of trick in the current scenario!

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7 SEO Tasks to Complete Before Even Thinking about Hiring an Agency

There are many small business owners that try to find a balance between hiring an SEO agency and trying to do a few things on their own. It makes sense to want to have control over your website, and it makes sense to familiarize yourself with the process first so that you can hire a great agency. However, there is a fine line between what SEO tasks a company should perform first and what SEO tasks a company should leave to the experts. If you’re trying to figure out what you should do before you hire an agency in order to keep this control, don’t sweat it. Below lists seven things to keep in mind:

1. Have clear goals in mind. This might be a no-brainer to most, but it’s worth mentioning just in case. Before you set out to hire an SEO agency to help your efforts, make sure that you have clear goals in mind. This doesn’t necessarily mean SEO goals (rank number one by this time, earn this many backlinks, etc.), but rather means goals for your company in general. Who is your audience, what do you want your audience to gain, etc.
2. Hire your own great content writer. Understanding great SEO doesn’t mean much if you don’t understand great content. Most SEO agencies will be equipped with content writers, but it’s helpful to have your own writer that you hired working with your company. This will help you begin to understand what it is you truly want out of your content, and it helps give you control at the start. It’s tough to know what you want until you really get going, so hiring your own writer is a great way to make that happen.
3. Begin building links. Some might advise against this because there is a chance that a company will start building bad links, but the majority of companies can handle building links for a short while before consulting the help of an agency. Starting to build internal links as well as linking out to other websites that are well known is a good way to build up your PR and credibility before an agency gets to you. It will help speed things up.
4. Foster relationships across the web. It’s never a bad idea to get started talking with others across the web. Write guest articles and start establishing those relationships. This will also help speed up your agency’s efforts when it comes time.
5. Dabble in social media. Set up a social media account for your company on all the big networks—Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You might not know exactly how to optimize them, but at least having a presence will help give you a jumpstart.
6. Install an SEO plugin. Installing an SEO plugin to your site will help give you an idea about what it takes to optimize a piece of content. This will help you know what to look for when you do hire an agency.
7. Familiarize yourself with the source code. This is a bit trickier, but some aspects of web development aren’t too difficult to understand. Do a little bit of research on the canonical tag and familiarize yourself with what it looks like and why it matters. Hint:This is the tag that deals with duplicate content!

Of course, many people are able to complete all SEO tasks without the help of an agency or an expert. It is usually a good idea to consult one or the other and/or attend seminars to make sure you’re on the right track; however it’s incredibly possible to complete these steps listed above and then just keep going.

Have you hired an SEO agency in the past? Did you find that there were SEO tasks that you wish you had completed first? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comments below.

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5 Devastating Local SEO Mistakes—and How to Avoid Them

In recent weeks, this blog has focused a great deal on the concept of local SEO—and not without reason. Just consider some of these statistics: An astonishing 97 percent of all consumers search for local businesses on Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Meanwhile, somewhere around 69 percent of all search queries are affected by geographic data or by the searcher’s location—and that number is only going up all the time. In other words: It is imperative for businesses to get local SEO right. This means knowing some of the most common local SEO mistakes, and how to avoid them.

Using Bad Keywords

What happens if you construct an otherwise-superlative local SEO campaign, but implement poor keywords? The short answer is that you end up getting a lot of traffic, but that traffic is not comprised of qualified leads. It is vital to use keywords that denote not just industry generalizations, but specific products and services that you have on offer, as well as the specific geographic areas in which you’re seeking customers and clients.

A related note is that businesses should strike a balance between not localizing their keywords enough, and localizing too much. If you don’t include any keywords related to your geographic location, then you’re not really optimizing for local consumers, and the traffic you bring in is going to include a lot of folks who simply aren’t in your target demographic. Putting too much emphasis on your location, and not enough on your products and services, will have a similar effect of bringing in traffic, but not necessarily hot leads.

Keyword Stuffing

What does keyword stuffing mean, in relation to local SEO? In a nutshell, it means that you’re including as many keywords in your title and meta tags as you can, paying no heed to whether these tags actually make sense. Your title and meta tags are great places to include some keywords, but these pieces of content should also be helpful and readable, to users and to search engines. A North Carolina florist might have a title tag that reads, “North Carolina Florist & Flower Delivery.” A keyword-stuffed alternative would be, “North Carolina NC Flowers NV Florist Carolina Charlotte Asheville.” The latter is simply cumbersome, and will not only cause your site to lose credibility, but Google rankings, as well.

Neglecting to Build Links

The recent Google Penguin update was designed to penalize sites that implement duplicitous or dishonest link-building, which has got many business owners thinking that link-building is no longer a viable local SEO tactic. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The important thing is to go about link-building through totally legitimate and above-board methods.

As you build links, make sure that not all of them are going to your homepage. Some of your links should be directed to specific product and service landing pages—or else, those specific pages may not show up in Google search results the way you need them to.

Not Utilizing Headings and On-Site Navigation Tools

Here’s a secret of local SEO: The easier it is for a user to navigate your site and to quickly find desired information, the more accurately the search bots will be able to crawl, categorize, and index your site. As such, easy navigation is key. One approach is to use plenty of headings and subheadings within your content, which clearly denote what the content is about, what information users can expect to find, and how search engines should classify the content.

Not Including Contact Information on Each Page

Would you believe that we have come across companies who put the wrong phone number on their website—or else don’t include a phone number at all? This is a major local SEO error, because the phone number included on your page is one of the main ways in which Google determines the specific geographic location of your company. Include a phone number on each page of your site, not just the contact page.

The bottom line is that local SEO is vital for businesses, but also easy to get wrong; make sure you know what the most common pitfalls are, and that you do everything you can to avoid them!

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SEO is NOT dead, you are just doing it wrong!

Recently I have been going to a few events in the Indian market, at every event which has an SEO component I always see people asking the same question or making the same statement that “SEO is dead, content marketing is the way” or “SEO is dead social media is the way of the future”. that been said every time I log onto Facebook I am heavily targeted by “SEO is dead” advertising like this:

Whilst I agree that SEO has changes over the years I believe people need to be more educated with SEO, gone of the days or low quality scraped content website with corner cutting SEO, the SEO that will work in today’s market is high quality SEO which has a technical element.

10 key elements we implemented on this project to yield positive SEO results and to increase traffic by over 400,000 unique visitors a month (comparing January 2012 and January 2013) were:

Strategy 1. Provide a full analysis of the current link profile using:

(1) Majestic SEO – www.majesticseo.com

(2) Google Webmaster Tools www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

(3) Open site explorer opensiteexplorer.org – this stage in the process allowed us to identify the links which were not natural and were from low quality locations online.

Strategy 2. Removing links from link networks which were pointing to the client – many people do direct to webmasters of link networks to remove link networks we consulted with the client to work out who the prior agencies were and to go direct to the agency to have the link network taken down, I would not advise any to use a link network as it can be a sure fire way to destroy you link building strategy.

Strategy 3. Removing other dodgy links which involved a general link clean up, you might have to run link detox software on the site www.linkdetox.com if you consider the link profile to be large, in the case of the site we were dealing with it was quite an extensive link profile. As the disavow tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1 was not available when we needed to remove these links we had the links removed by contacting webmasters directly, my advice in this process is to use a girl’s name on the email when you contact webmasters they are usually males who will warm to the chance that a girl has emailed them, believe me I have tested this methodology numerous times over the years.

Strategy 4. Implementing better link building targeting 20% targeting the home page and 80% targeting lower level sub pages and sub category sections on the website with anchor text targeting brand heavily. Too many SEO’s only focus on driving links to the home page you need to build your link building strategy around diversification to lower sub level pages.

Strategy 5. Further link building from government, social, higher quality PR, outreach and also blogging.

High quality link building takes time, this is why outreach and building quality personas for your niche is crucial, If you obtain one high quality government link it can be the same value as building say 50 lower value links, hence the time invested in focusing on quality far out weights low quality.

Strategy 6. Looking at the current PPC strategy the client was using and finding opportunities from the PPC front which can be utilized for SEO. PPC should be one of your strongest areas for collecting keyword data which can be used for your SEO research. Also you can take a top series of PPC converting pages and created SEO based landing pages for these terms.

Strategy 7. Implementing mark ups onto the site such as Google Rel=Author, don’t get me wrong the correct mark ups can work very effectively in driving additional traffic, especially if you are using a blog where many of the authors have 100′s if not 1000′s of pre-existing posts. Implementing a large scale Rel=Author set up can work very well. Another important element is also implementing price and rating information an example can be seen below:

Strategy 8. Cleaning up many elements of the site architecture is also another highly important area, when you do a large scale piece of keyword research for a website also remember to implement sections of the keyword research in the sites navigation. Also look for articles on the website which are highly popular and cross promote content internally on the website. Internal structure of websites is still highly important and if you are not

Strategy 9. Working with the content team to effectively implement a further content strategy.

Content strategy is huge and if you are not investing considerable time into working with a content team you are missing it out, ideally each month you need to meet with the content team at least twice to talk about content ideas you wish to implement on the website in the near future. I would build a content calendar and look for upcoming events and also holidays. For example you can build content around all the popular holidays and events such as: Valentine’s Day/ Easter/ Christmas or even any sporting events such as the World Cup. Also look at other competitors in your market see what they are doing which is working effectively and implement a similar strategy. Another important point when developing your content strategy is to join it back up with your SEO efforts.

Strategy 10. Working to make some on site tweaks and fixes with the developers.

Working with the development team is also a huge part of fixing up a website, after you complete a comprehensive website audit you are going to need to work with your developers to get changes implemented, if you do not have a good relation with the developers changes may take a while to be implemented on the site so always remember to keep the developers on your good side.

These 10 changes were just a small section of a wider range of fixes and strategy which was completed for the website, overall many things were done.

The result of the ongoing high quality SEO services provided by my team yielded:

traffic increase SEO

So as you can see from the above analytic’s analysis that SEO is far from dead, and if you employ a high quality strategy and high quality methods it is not going to be dead for many years to come. 

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