One of the questions no doubt very highon the list of both webmasters and business owners is what to do for2013 in order to get to or remain on that fabled first page onGoogle.
The details of this are not known toanyone on the planet, but there are some clear trends and these leadto some clear conclusions in general terms.
Google captains have been steering in aclear “User is King” direction. As this makes sense for allinvolved apart from blackhat experts, it is safe to assume this willcontinue to be the case. This makes life for webmasters simplerbecause we can now see what our websites should be like by simplylooking at it through the eyes of our customers.
Do our customers want to read a pagethat continuously tells them how wonderful our company is? Would you?No? Than don’t do it. If you are trying to find a product, do youreally want to read 15 times that this company is the cheapestwithout actually seeing the price? No? Then don’t do that either.
What do we want when we search forsomething? Information, not propaganda. By and large, we want thatinformation in a structured, organised way. If your company sellsballs, the (potential) customers don’t want an endless list of randomballs. They want one particular ball for one particular purpose.Let’s say it’s a tennisball. But this tennisball is not for playingtennis, it’s for the dog. I want to throw or kick that ball so my dogcan run after it, find it and bring it back.
That means the ideal ball is:
Contrary to most tennisballs, NOT greenbecause it will be too hard to find in the long grass.
Contrary to most others, it MUST benon-toxic.
It must be at least to some degreetooth-proof.
It must be waterproof.
To make my choice, I want yourball-website to make my life easy by offering a structure thatseparates footballs from beach balls and tennis balls. I want to readabout how the ball is made and how that helps to make the ball safefor Spike. I want to see pictures of it with realistic colours so Ican pick one that will be easy find in the grass. Maybe even a shortclip that shows me how well it bounces.
Only then will I have a look at theprice.
The Google engineers are getting betterevery day in emulating our behaviour and choosing when using searchengines. That means the better you get a creating a website thatfulfils my needs, in a way that installs confidence in you, yourcompany and your product, the higher your site will rank in theserps. The inverse is also true. Those same engineers also get betterat filtering out unwanted results. That means old tricks are beingblocked e.g. metatag stuffing like “”Keyword = blue tennisball,big tennisball, big blue tennisballs, green tennisball “” is nowa pointless exercise. The same goes for keyword stuffing in the texte.g. “”If you are looking for tennisballs, you will find what youneed on this tennisball site where we sell tennisballs cheaper thanany other tennisball shop.””
Last but not least, we want theinformation to be valid and up to date. That means you need to keepyour site valid and up to date by regularly adding new pages aboutnew products or variations as well as updating/correcting existingpages.
All this combined means we will have tospend more time creating new content and can save time/money gettingrid of “dedicated seo exercises” like buying links or payingpeople to submit countless spammy articles to blogfarms.
Not just creating new content, but re-thinking how we use and manage our existing content. Most companies will have a finite demand for new content, particularly if they trade in real-world objects or even less tangible services – once you’ve got your full product list, company information and a bit of promotional blurb, that’s really all you need. Anything more and you’re just looking at creating content for the sake of it. What’s important is to make sure that everything you have on your website is doing its job properly – both in terms of converting visits to sales, and in terms of signposting search engines the right way so that they can deliver people to the most relevant pages.
Well, Thanks for this nice post, what exactly we should be doing. I have been doing directories submission, forum posting, social bookmarking, blog posting, etc. Am I doing right?
First and foremost, you should produce a useful/helpful, informative website. If your website doesn’t have enough pull to keep readers interested, no amount of linking, posting or “facebooking” will get it to number 1.
Your surrounding activity should be a support for the website, not an attempt to push something to the top that doesn’t have the body to be there.
There have been countless threads here that give advice on how to create worthwhile content, my recent post titled “do’s and don’t of seo” is only one of many.
Well, In 2013 the techniques for seo like directories submission, social bookmarking etc would be useless. you should make an attractive and useful site. social media, youtube etc can help to get it on the first page of search engines.
I feel (on the basis of trend of frequent updates) SEO is going to be more mature and accountable. In 2013 probably SEO will be more aligned with objectives of searcher, and those who just do SEO for getting ranked for getting ads would be wipe out. Quality content and real reference and credibility(So called backlinks) will lead. The current methodology (so called off page activities would be affected). Usability measures might play a major role.
Last year I stated that traditional SEO will die out in favour of general Internet marketing and I’m glad to see that my predictions are fairly spot on. Over the past year we’ve seen the general on-page SEO techniques become more mature and validated, and tasks like Information Architecture take centre stage over simple link building.
This year I predict that we’ll see more of the same, but for some old industries to kick and scream as they slowly die out.
For starters, the traditional SEO firm will start to disappear in favour of marketing efforts from established agencies. Work will be tight for mid-to-large agencies and we’ll see them taking smaller chunks of the market. The downside of this is that I think spam will play a huge role in 2013, particularly from India and Asian countries as small firms start to lose their markets and resort to spam to get their names out. We saw it with outsourced development and we’ll see it with SEO.
Google has done a good job weaning SEO shysters away, and I predict that this year will see Google try to push spammers away more than ever. Google’s large team of data scientists will make numerous breakthroughs to combat spam in their search engine and I envision updates like the infamous “Panda” update to be much stronger.
In short, SEO will refine itself and expert opinion will mean much much more than before. Small-time Indian SEO firms will start dying and as such we’ll see more spam than ever, and to combat this Google will unleash breakthroughs in their efforts to curb poor SEO tactics.
Before doing any kind of Off-page activities in SEO now give main focus on On-Page, your content must be the unique and well-versed and for the user’s point of view not for the search engine’s point of view. Secondly your site must have proper categories and sub categories. Url should be the proper and similarly all on-page issues must be resolved and then you should move on off-page. In Off-page you should be doing little bit work.
Web design field is so crowded that doing SEO seems to be a waste of time. We’re more focused on creating content like blogs or videos which people can find useful and hope that they share it on social networking websites.
Google Adwords are our primary source of lead generation. We also blog often.
I watch my industry first page close. 4 months ago I saw the whole page change. Well optimized sites fell off and small sites with not an optimization clue were on the first page. This included site.blogspot number one and etc. Are you kidding me? A free site made in ten minutes that prob copied 90% of their content places higher than those that spent thousands and hundreds of hours. Crazy
on the whole and in short what can I say is SEO is going to become more and more challenging tasks in 2013 not only that, webmasters have to look forward to the further new updates and algorithms that Google will put out to make life more difficult for the webmasters and also to find ways to overcome those.
For this webmaster would have to continuously update themselves with new trends in the SEO World
There is a common misconception that SEO is some sort of technical hocus pocus that is needed to get your site to rank well. This may have been the case a long time ago, but today that statement is about as valid as saying trains run on steam.
Today’s SEO is going more and more towards ensuring that your site is actually helpful for people that want to know about the particular subject of your site. That means your site must be set up and streamlined in such a way that it is found by people searching for that particular subject, but not accidentally comes up for those looking for a related subject.
Imagine your are trying to find somehting out about proteine in milk. Milk may be the main ingredient for cheese, but cheese has nothing to do with what you are researching, and therefore should not come up in the serp.
No; I don’t agree with you friend, in 2013 SEO is going to make more advance like
Google is going to give concentration to copy righting.
and there are some questions about your site that you have copy right low for your site name, images, content, script etc
if you are using Images so are you going to use alt tag, title tag into image.
how much keyword density you are going to keep?
are you going to make some type of relationship with other websites or people?
now these above asking questions are most important?
As today we are standing at the end of 2012, and there were lots of Search Engine updates in this year, we can expect SEO to be more challenging in 2013.
Few months back I lasted top ranking position for my keywords in SERPs.
As you all discussed above, if quality content & on-page techniques going to be concentrate more in 2013 SEO then I will get my keyword positions back.
Directory submission to High PR sites are still useful. One should avoid sites which are not related to your niche.
Social bookmarking is just for bringing traffic.
Let me tell you friend, Google is not giving priority to directory links because mostly users use same description and title into all directories. or half of them, which is not Good
I strongly believe that SEO shouldn’t be the only priority of an experienced webmaster. Several years ago, search engines were not this popular, I could remember a few of them like Altavista and Askjeeves. No website can remain in the first page of any keyword for long because search engines want to make money through their PPC. So , what they do is that they put you on first page so that you will get a lot of traffic and later remove you. Once you are used to the traffic, and of course you would have made some money in the process, you won’t have any other choice than to purchase their PPC. Do you think Google is a missionary organization?