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Like most people, SEO practitioners reflect on the past year and attempt to improve their skills in the new year.
If you haven’t made up your mind what exactly you want to change in the coming year, check out these suggestions for 30 SEO resolutions for 2012 that draw on modern industry best practices and growing trends.
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Sharing is the key activity when it comes to proper social media participation and beyond. When you don’t share anything on the web today, you can’t compete with those who do. They get all the attention, links and ultimately sales or whatever they are after.
I compiled a list of 36 Social Media sharing resources that cover a variety of content types, such as how to articles, statistics, tools for business people.
Recently I’ve written about Klout score optimisation. Since then I and others who outed themselves as actively using Klout have been attacked by self proclaimed SEO stars and other people who seemingly “hate Klout”. Can you hate a metric? Obviously people get very emotional when it comes to Klout.
Klout measures the social media influence of people. While it fails at determining your real life influence, it’s quite accurate for measuring how active and influential you are on social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.
That’s why some people hate Klout: they are only influential within a small closed group, while they have never shared enough with the general public on social media to get appreciation from the masses.
What did I say when people ridiculed me for using Klout to determine people’s influence? I said that I am quite sure that Google internally has a similar system of finding out who exerts influence on the social web and who does not. It wasn’t a very daring prediction, it was just an extrapolation based on the steps Google has undertaken in the past. Google has already been focusing on authorship, real names and the social graph for a while.
Now Bill Slawski has written an article on the reputation systems Google uses, might use or will use in the future. There are three mentioned in the post. The most interesting one is the Agent Rank. Not only does the name sound familiar and self-explanatory to some extent, but it’s also a patent Google has filed. It most probably gets or will be used for Google +1 votes.
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It’s this time of year again! In the previous years my web trends lists were very successful, both as predictions and by traffic or number of shares.
People working in the web industries want to know what’s ahead.
So for 2012 I want to tell you again what’s coming up. Basically I’m not predicting anything here; instead I just list trends you can already see and measure, but which will be obvious next year.
While the search industry has been all abuzz with the bad news of Google SSL search, most average people might not even understand what happened. They may wonder “why is (not provided) my most popular keyword in Google Analytics?” (Other analytics solutions might not even show up this data at all). Also: how can you fix it?
First off, I want to explain in simple terms what happened. I tried to explain it to my wife recently and she didn’t understand at once. So this is the version she could fathom easily: Google hides the keywords people use to find your site from now on, or at least a significant part of them. All these hidden keywords are tagged as ‘(not provided)’ in Google Analytics.
On SEOptimise currently (the first week of November) 14,7% of Google search visitors had no keyword sent with its referrer.
The referrer is the page address where they came from. On my own blog, SEO 2.0, the number was even higher, with 16,27% of Google visitors. Also, (not provided) is the most popular “keyword” on both blogs.
Whose referral data gets hidden? All users logged in to Google services get redirected to SSL search now by default.
So all these people hide the keywords they use from the sites they visit. Google and thus the CIA, MI5 or any other secret service can still access these data for at least 18 months.
In an ideal world everybody uses analytics tools in a way that ensures that
get tracked and both client and SEO can
see where the most valuable visitors come from and how SEO efforts contribute to the overall success of a site.
Sadly, in reality it’s not always as easy to accomplish. While it’s now easier to sell analytics services to clients (as everybody agrees that you need them and clients are quick to give you access to Google Analytics), in many cases there are lots of issues that combined make you apply SEO tactics blindly.
In recent months, a few non-SEO related and one search marketing publication gained significant attention with the good old technique of “SEO myths” posts.
A while ago I argued that I prefer to spread the correct SEO best practices than to repeat SEO myths, even when meaning to debunk them.
You know the brain does not always remember the “no”. It remembers the myths, so writing about them perpetuates them.
Well, the SEO myths posts written recently have been so successful that I had to rethink my approach of not mentioning what’s wrong.
When everybody talks about them anyway, I can do it as well without providing much more publicity. On the other hand, these posts weren’t really all factual. Some SEO myths aren’t myths. Some of the articles even contradict themselves. Other SEO myths are really myths but the explanation why is not really true. Finally, many misleading myths haven’t been mentioned at all while they wreak havoc on websites every day.
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Google is now not the only monopolist on many search markets including the UK, but the mega-corporation is overtaking new markets, crushing the competition with more or less ruthless tactics.
Some SEO industry pundits such as Aaron Wall already advise you to prepare for a time after SEO when Google will finally keep most clicks for itself.
The tendency is already there, as some search engine result pages (SERPs) are already dominated by ads and Google-owned paid services.
I like the way a Google Panda victim has put it:
“Google Panda is the result of many years of struggle, with Google trying to eliminate go-between services like news aggregators and specialised search engines,” explains Chappaz. “Why? Because Google’s revenues for the broad search platform are slowing down. Google needs to eat in its own ecosystem to keep its revenues flowing.
What can you do about Google entering your market and making everybody go out of business quickly?
Bookmarks are now links. The artist formerly known as social bookmarking site Delicious.com has been relaunched by the new owners Avos, run by the former founders of YouTube.
The new site is clean, simple and image oriented.
Obviously Delicious has learned from the many image bookmarking sites out there that have sprung all over the Web in the recent years. On the other hand the new site focuses on social sharing and commenting as well.
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Just a few years ago SEO was really simple. You had to be in the top 10 or rather in the top 3 for relevant keywords. Then the traffic came and with it the leads, sales or whatever you wished. Today there is no real top 10 anymore. Even if you are at #1 in the organic search results, you might be below the “fold” so that users have to scroll to see your site on the Google search results page aka SERP.
Google has introduced so many changes to most SERPS that you can’t ignore them and go on as if it’s still 2005. You have to change your SEO strategy accordingly.
While many people already have noticed that Universal search is all over the place, and images, video or news results get displayed frequently, many still behave as if SEO was about checking rankings and aiming for #1 in organic search. These 30 Google SERP changes impact your SEO strategy in a way you can’t ignore.
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