As any website owner knows, search-engine optimization—SEO—is a
rapidly moving target.
What worked well last week might work against you today. Hordes of
website operators learned this the hard way earlier this year, when two
key updates to Google’s algorithms took effect. Known by the cute code
names of “
Panda”
and “Penguin,” these updates were designed to severely penalize
websites with thin, weak, or duplicated content. The goal: To rid
Google’s search results of content farms and spam blogs by using quality
metrics, instead of merely relying on the old
PageRank system to measure a site’s importance.
The end result has been to force webmasters to do what pros have
been advising for years: Stop stuffing keywords into low-grade copy and
focus on quality. Unique blogs, images, and video are all increasingly
key in today’s Web world.
Of course, more and more scenery, so to speak, accompanies this mandate.
Google+
might not yet matter much to most individuals, but it’s becoming more
important to search engines, along with Facebook and Twitter links to
content. How your site looks and loads on a mobile browser is also
increasingly important, as search results are ever more accessed via
smartphone.
All of that is merely prologue: If you’re not already working on
all of the above, you’re far, far behind. For those already following
this advice, now is the time to take a look ahead at what the next
18 months of SEO are likely to bring. We spoke to dozens of experts to
get the skinny on SEO for 2013. Here are the top tips we discovered.
This Website Will Disavow Any Knowledge of Your Actions
Use this tool to prevent Bing from penalizing your site if spammy sites link to it.What
happens if someone links to you from a spammy website? It makes you
look bad; in fact, search engines can deem that your site is in fact a
spam site as well. Your site is guilty by association, even if you have
nothing to do with the linker.
Bing has rolled out a tool in its
Webmaster Tools
that let you “disavow” links from such places. It’s largely
self-explanatory. Just add a page or domain to the tool and click the
Disavow button to tell Bing you do not approve. This may improve your
site's position in search results, but almost certainly it will help to
rid the Web of some of its spam. Google’s “disavow” tool is expected in
the coming months.
Carson Ward of
Distilled.net
(one of several online marketing agencies whose experts we interviewed)
says these "disavow" tools will raise a lot of questions for search
optimizers. “Will site owners be more likely to use tactics that search
engines frown on if they can simply turn and tell search engines to
discount the spam they have created? Will search engines trust site
owners to crowdsource spam detection, and should they? Google's
implementation of a disavow tool will largely determine the future of
Web spam.”
It’s Not Where They Link, It’s How They Link
Ryan Draving, CEO of
CompeteLeap,
stresses that machine-generated writing and “spinning” (rewriting or
slightly changing someone else’s content to look original) will become
useless or even detrimental to your website, adding, “Search results
will begin to shift more and more toward brands, and away from websites
built purely for SEO. Brands typically invest in the kind of quality
content that generates strong links from, and engagement with, bloggers,
other websites, and users on social media networks.”
Those incoming links are still critical, but Draving notes that
over-reliance on exact keyword phrases coming into your site (like
“Chicago emergency plumber”) will penalize you. Says Draving, “Keep less
than 11 percent of external links coming to your website via exact
keyword phrases. Google expects to see either your URL or your company
name as the link text for the majority of your inbound links. So instead
of asking every website to link to you with your favorite keywords
('DIY Internet Marketing'), allow them to use the text they want.”
Don’t Discount Yahoo
It’s long been a habit for website operators to forget about Yahoo,
even though Yahoo and Bing combined still have nearly a 30 percent
market share. But what happens now in the
Marissa Mayer era? Will Yahoo rise again as a search leader? Kaysha Kalkofen, co-founder of
tSunela,
says, “Keep an eye on Yahoo's relationship with Bing, especially in the
paid search space. If that evolves, the paid search market will open up
again.”
Take the Credit
Author rankings could become more important than page rankings in the second half of 2013.Have
you ever done a Google search and noticed head shots next to a few of
the posts at the top of the results? This is part of an experimental
program within Google designed to link authors with published content,
regardless of where that content lives.
Jon Payne, President and Founder of
Ephricon Web Marketing,
explains how “AuthorRank” works: “It’s generally the case that most
significant websites have many different authors that contribute to
their content. Google is looking at how to trust links from one author
versus another, and weight them differently. We see AuthorRank replacing
PageRank most likely in the latter half of 2013. Businesses must set up
the ability to claim authorship of their content, but the process is
pretty easy and (not surprisingly) is mostly handled within Google+.” To
get started with the process, get your Google+ profile up to snuff (you
must have a recognizable face-shot photo as your profile picture) and
check out
plus.google.com/authorship.
Seek Out Snippets
Structured information, known as "rich snippets," can help your site float to the top of search results. In
related news, you may also notice that when you search Google, little
tidbits of information float up to the top: Search for a baseball team,
for example, and their current record and recent games will appear
first. These are called “rich snippets,” a form of structured
information that can get your content to the top of search results.
David Erickson, publisher of the
e-Strategy blog,
says, “Webmasters should take a look at their search results and those
of their competitors to see if any of the listed sites are accompanied
by rich snippets. If so, I'd take a look at the type of structured
information being included in those results and see if you can include
such information on your own site. If you're using WordPress, there are
often plug-ins available that help ease the formatting of such
information.”
Publish More Than You Think You Should
The days of weekly updates are over. Google is increasingly favoring
fresh content, and that means publishing not just daily but multiple
times per day if possible. Nicholas E. Kinports, Digital Strategy Lead
of
lonelybrand,
says, “Digital marketers should create and stick to an editorial
calendar that provides for new content several times per day that is
unique and industry-focused. That content should be woven throughout Web
and app pages to create a dynamic ecosystem.”
Updating your site frequently is one sure way of boosting your search engine ranking.
This makes logical sense in the Twitter era, says Josh Gross, SEO specialist with
Coalition Technologies,
who adds, “A website that more frequently updates its content is likely
to be more relevant then a website that only makes periodic updates.”
Google Gets in the Shopping Game
Google Shopping
has long been a small yet significant way for merchants to drive
traffic directly to their products without having to buy an ad. That’s
about to change: Google Shopping is going pay-for-play (via a system
much like AdWords), which means that the days of free product links are
coming to an end. It’s too early to say how expensive this might end up
being, but for now, says Jeff Soukotta, Founder of
Adaptise, e-commerce site operators should prepare to become familiar with the changes and start thinking about budgets.
Speed Matters
In the quest to make websites more feature-filled and social, website
operators often saddle their sites with scripts and plug-ins that take
their toll on how quickly the site loads. A slow site isn’t a monumental
thing, but users hate sites that won’t load. As a consequence, Google
is increasingly becoming interested in the topic, and it’s likely to
play a more important role in rankings down the line. As Tom Hughes-Croucher, Principal of
Jetpacks for Dinosaurs,
sums it up, “In effect, Google isn't just looking for the most keywords
per landing page, it is looking for the best landing page experience
for users.”
Structured information, known as "rich snippets," can help your site float to the top of search results. In
related news, you may also notice that when you search Google, little
tidbits of information float up to the top: Search for a baseball team,
for example, and their current record and recent games will appear
first. These are called “rich snippets,” a form of structured
information that can get your content to the top of search results.
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