It’s time for the ‘old’ SEO dogs to learn new tricks. I’ve been doing creative marketing for 10+ years and a lot has changed in the past year. If you haven’t stayed abreast of the new changes in the SEO community, then you’ve missed out tremendously. The new changes to Google’s algorithm woke up sleeping giants, crushed people’s income, and changed the game dramatically. Here are 5 things you should know in order to survive this year.
1. What’s the Penguin everyone keeps talking about?
In April of 2012, Google released an algorithm update known as the Penguin update. Not every webmaster suffered in this update, but those who participated in any of the following did:
- Link Schemes (unrelated links, link exchanges, buying links, etc)
- Cloaking (hiding keywords)
- Keyword Stuffing (just like it sounds – excessive keyword density)
- Duplicate content (content that is appearing on more than one site, almost word for word)
Website owners that participated in these things lost roughly 40-90% of their traffic overnight. I personally know some entrepreneurs who were living the dream because of their rankings and now they’re deeply in debt because Google killed their ‘golden goose’.
Moral of the story? Focus on building quality links
2. The trend towards social backlinks
Some have worried that backlinks are either obsolete or on their way quickly. At the moment, backlinks are still necessary. With the new updates, we’ve seen a change in the top 10 ranking factors. Out of the top 10, five or them are social. The trend is towards social backlinks.
In case you’re wondering what the top 10 ranking factors are, they are:
- facebook shares
- number of backlinks
- facebook total
- facebook comments
- facebook links
- tweets
- % of backlinks that are no follow
- keyword in domain name
- % of backlinks with keyword
- % of backlinks with stopwords
Moral of the story? Focus on your social media presence and create content that users engage with.
3. Evolution of PPC search
With new devices coming out, Google adjusts their PPC module for advertisers. It used to be that you could set your ads to target desktops and mobile devices separately. It’s not the case anymore. Google has now thrown all of them together because they say that more search is being done from mobile devices anyways.
This is especially important as a service provider running ads. You can adjust your bid to be higher when someone is searching and they’re closer to your location.
4. Facebook and Google are at war with another
Google has sat and watched Facebook’s rise to fame.. and they’re envious. Google always thought their search engine would be the primary place people would go to for information. It turns out Facebook is actually the number 1 place people are going for information; with Google trailing right behind.
Both companies are rushing to mobile to capitalize on the most current gold rush. Facebook just recently released Graph Search, which allows its users to find information based on what their friends like. This tells SEO’s that they need embrace social media more than ever.
Just think about it, if your business doesn’t have likes, then the chances of it popping up are little to nothing. On the flip side, if I am searching for ‘chinese that my friends like’ and a restaurant is liked by several of my friends, I’ll probably end up eating there. It gets rid of the ‘guinea pig’ mentality.
5. Google Authorship
Google is now allowing webmasters to ‘claim’ their content by adding a rel=author tag to our posts. You’ll need a Google + page to begin the process. Personally, I’ve seen increased conversions up to 3x in the SERPs since using authorship.
When someone searches and finds one of your posts in the SERP’s, they’ll see your picture next to your post. It’s great because it adds a personal touch to your posts.
