Just like the millennium bug, there has been talk for as long as we can remember about the impending end of the world on December 21st 2012. There has even been (not so much of a) hit Hollywood film – imaginatively titled 2012, which depicts the supposed events.
While most of us realise that this is a fable created on the internet, the end could in fact be nigh for your website, with the four horsemen of the Google apocalypse swallowing it up in the rankings if you don’t have the right SEO measures in place to protect you from the storm ahead.
With the New Year comes many changes and this couldn’t be more relevant than it is in the ever-evolving world of SEO, as alterations to how websites are ranked and what will decide where they stand are set to be rife throughout the year.
But there’s no need to give up hope and be thankful for your success while it lasted, as following these tips and trends will be sure to navigate your site safely through to 2013 and keep it well above the websites that will be languishing in the pain of a rapid ranking downfall.
Social Media
Go to any of your bookmarked websites and the top of each page will be adorned with Google +1, Facebook Like, Retweet and LinkedIn Share icons that perfectly describe the growing influence social media has over the internet and therefore what we tend to look at online.
If one of your friends shares a great website on Facebook or Twitter, you will be more likely to look at it and engage with the content than you would if an unknown company or stranger was to post it. The search engines will be taking a similar approach in 2012 as they will place more value on websites and content that have been recommended by visitors through social signals.
Making sure your visitors can easily share your website or content to their friends is a must for the success of your SEO, and heightening your presence on these networking sites will give you yet another way to interact with the target market and give your business more of a recognisable, human face rather than an unknown, unrelatable corporate image.
The benefit of these sites not only applies to the SEO benefit either, as utilising social media (especially Twitter) as a tool for market research can help you see what the demand is for and what your audience want – this could even be done by typing your keywords into the search bar on Twitter to see what is being tweeted in relation to them.
Fresh, Unique Content
This has been the case in previous years when the end of our SEO world was further at the back of our minds, but it will prove to be even more important this year, as with Google Panda 2 and other updates, there will be even more emphasis on sites with fresh and quality content.
Linking in to the points made above about social media, the time you take to ensure that whatever you’re uploading on your website is of a high quality and worth-reading will reward you with a better ranking. 2012 is certainly about quality and not quantity.
The Bing Boom
Finally, the world won’t go ‘boom’, but Bing just might, as it is predicted to control a greater market share in 2012 than it has in previous years, possibly drawing users away from Google to its own service with notable moves that has seen it integrated into Xbox Live and Kinect, for instance.
The main things to look out for this year collectively boil down to SEO no longer being exclusively centred around keywords and the like, but involving a more human, all-inclusive approach that puts responsibility on website owners to take more time composing their content and interacting with their audience. It might take a little more work, but adopting this active approach will make sure that your treasured website isn’t left in a pile of ashes at the bottom of the search engines when the year is up.
This guest post was written by Richard Paul, content writer for a specialist Internet Marketing company. Offering a range of SEO services, complemented by E-Marketing, Social Media and Video Production, they can help to enhance the online presence of your company.
Great post, (Sanjeev?).
The biggest changes this year, for SEO, seems to be social media and brand awareness… Both have seen huge changes as ranking metrics by Google!
Social media is being used as a means of authorship association and branding specificity is being used to highlight well known brands.
Capitalising on either of these can be very worth while!
Social networking is really a king under content of our site. Some blogs have a very little amount of traffic per day. However, a great post can get the blog’s going up to the sky with tons tons tons of traffic coming.
Ya, nobody can tell when that moment will be, but it can happen to any blog and one post can change the traffic stats..
Content is King! But remember that fresh, fact and well research content is what we need in order to gain readers. Well consider the fact the many readers only read the first part of an article, so having a unique and well research article(only only in the beginning but the entire article) is very important. I’ll also have to agree about repeatedly keywords, that would not help and is bad for SEO.
Yes, Many would only read the start of the document which makes it important to give a good start. But after that its the whole post so a well documented stuff is good.
We should write articles not for SEO only, but also keeping in mind our readers’ interests and preferences. Because if we don’t have any readers or customers, then why do we work at all?
I agree, I always believe that we should write the article for humans and then we should optimize it for SEO….starting with SEO in mind might not result a good content.
fresh and unique content is important to generate traffic to your blog. bear in mind that you need to be more careful in writing your contents, repeated and redundant words is not good for your exposure!
repeated and redundant words are equal to duplicate contents, a big no for SEO. Thanks for adding the point here.
Comments are closed.