2013 Semi-annual SEO Review: The Best 10 Do’s and Don’ts

Content Marketing on Top

Content marketing could arguably be seen as more important than traditional on-site SEO. Offering your visitors useful resources and engaging content is now the key to landing prime ranking spots across the various search engines, but don’t count-out the necessity to balance this with SEO tactics.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Piggins recently expressed the same, stating in an insightful article about content marketing that SEO is not dead, just transformed.

“These scenarios do not herald the ‘death of SEO’. Far from it. Thefuture lies in collaboration. The relationship between content marketing and SEO only reaches its true potential when it’s designed to be symbiotic. This means that brands need to underpin their content with SEO strategies like strong internal navigation… Theidea is to use varied skills to build hubs around interdependent content and search terms in order to nurture cross-selling potential.”

 

The Rise of Small Screens

The buzz around new technologies like Google Glass aims to shift SEO strategies all the more. It remains to be seen on a large scale what these screens really mean for rankings, but it’s likely that the need to reach page 1 results will now be usurped by needing the top 1-3 rankings all together. Mobile has already created this urgency with their smaller screens and impatient users, so things like Google Glass and the rumored iWatch will only up the ante. When users only see a few lines of results, it’s clear that most businesses won’t be able to stop at anything less than the top slot if they are after the lion’s share.
Over the past year there have been almost countless updates to Google’s algorithm, countless changes to search resultsacross several major search engines, and talk of even more countless changes and updates looming around every corner. Sothe following are what to do and what not to do in your SEO efforts throughout this year 2013.

 

Do’s

1. More Guest Posting
Guest posting, if done properly, will be a strategy that you will reap success from throughout this year and next. As long asthe content is top-notch and you are focusing on getting published on high quality, high-moderated blogs.

2. Emphasis on Authorship Markup
Not just talking about setting up Authorship Markup in your code for rich snippets, but also focusing on building up author Google+ profiles.

3. HTML5 Integration
Converting your sites to HTML5 will be huge because of the ability to leverage new tags for SEO like the tag or the tag. HTML5 integration = better communication to search engines on content and types of content.

4. Mobile Mobile Mobile!
Optimizing your site for mobile will be huge as well. But more importantly, not creating a separate mobile site but creating a responsive design that’s the same site just adjusted to work with mobile phones and tablets.

5. Social Media Pushes
Pushing branding efforts in Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will continue to be a major area of success for SEO. The people who have figured this out are increasing their organic search traffic hand over fist each month.

Don’ts

1. Low Quality Guest Posting
There’s really no difference in low quality guest posts from article submission sites. Which is why you must stay away from this. High quality only!

2. Article Submissions
This is just old-school and Google has gotten so good at evaluating these types of links. You may think they’re working now, but the end is near!

3. Buying Links
You’ll always hear a few SEOs touting their link buying strategies and how they still work when executed properly. Even more however, you hear of webmasters who’ve been penalized by Google because of paid links. It’s your choice.

4. Link Building Too Fast
Slow and steady wins the race. Google and Bing are going to reward patient SEOs. Why? Because big brands are patient. They’re around forever so they have to be patient. It’s the affiliates who aren’t patient and that’s who Google is trying to eliminate

5. Low Quality Content and Blogging
Always be on the lookout for Panda! One of the biggest don’ts of the year is publishing poor quality content in the form of pages or posts on your site.
Sometimes I find it better to structure a brainstorming or thought process not necessarily around “what works” but more around “what’s important.” This simple separation will help you prioritize better in your SEO efforts and truly understand where you should be putting your time, money and effort.