SEO in 2013

What is important in SEO today

I am asked every few days about SEO and there is a lot of confusion regarding what techniques to use to optimize a site.  So I will be writing a few articles about the new face of search engines.

Search engines are always changing the way we must promote a site because so many SEO people are looking for a way to automate the optimization task.  The search engines want to discover real websites and rank them properly – they program against SEO spam or automated SEO promotion. We all want a magic pill, to make it better now.  There is no magic SEO pill and if someone promises instant SEO results, run away.

Under old rules all you had to do was target keywords and then submit the website address to the search engines for inclusion.  Now that does not work well.

What Works … Pay Per Click I believe in organic SEO, concentrating on the site content and making sure the site search engine optimized.  Organic SEO builds long lasting search engine results and site visitation.  Pay per click or advertising to draw people to the site is a great way to jump start a web site visitation. However it the site is not optimized it will affect both site visits and search engine rankings.  So, I will be concentrating on the key elements of organic SEO in this article.
Keywords

Keywords are still important but the keywords must be chosen from the users’ perspective and targeted words should be some that people are more likely to type into a search engine. One must look at historical web search data and social media conversations for targeting a wide range of usable keywords in 2013.

User Experience

Speed matters so make sure the web site is fast.  The size of the graphics as well as server response times matter today.  Mobile response times are good measure of a sites performance. Slow sites are penalized by the search engines. You must think great “user experience” when designing a site and it’s content.

Content

Content is still king.  Make sure you provide relevant content written for the targeted audience.  Write for people that will want to see the content.  Video content is also very important, to your audience and the search engines ratings. How many people would rather watch a short video than read a small book.  Again provide content relevant to the target audience. Google will even use voice recognition to index the keywords spoken in the video sound track, so write the video script to be relevant too. The use of links on images and within the text content is very important.  Make sure any links are relevant to surrounding content.  Links should reference other content on the website as well as related outside links.

If you do link to an outside website, ask the webmaster of that site to link back to your site.  Be sure add the name of the author to any articles and blog posts for credibility.  The more human you make the content, the more trust you create between the site and the target audience and search engines will reward you for “trust.” Rich snippets and outside reviews are also very helpful for Google, Bing and Yahoo, the three major search engines.

In my next article I will continue the series with back link building and off site optimization. (The attached graphic is from Fuzz One Media)

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Dwight Cook – certified SEO specialist

 

See  – “SEO in 2013 – part two”