What do you expect from your website in the year 2013? The year 2012 gave us a lot to think about, in terms of SEO. The revolutionary Penguin update from Google earlier this year, changed the face of SEO as we knew it. While gearing up for the new year, you must chalk out a clear plan as to what do you expect from your website in the coming year.
If you already have an SEO campaign running for your website, you might want to start with a review of the activities in the past- a quick analysis, to estimate the benefit you have had from SEO. Based on this review, you would be able to better formulate the plan for the succeeding year. When it comes to SEO, it is as important to know what not to do as it is to know what to do. It is best to know SEO and be aware of the changes that are now being introduced.
An area that has been crying for attention is social media. In current times, ignoring the use of social media websites is one of the most foolish things an SEO analyst can do. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are now accompanied by various other sites like Pinterest etc., that are equally making their presence felt. However, mere presence on social media websites is of no use. What a website truly needs is smart use of social media. Trying to befool the user would only take you so far. To truly create an identity for itself, the website needs interactive, interesting social media accounts and not robot accounts. Another important thing is to make the information readily available and easy to share. Having a “connect” button on every page of your website or giving easy options to “share” content on major social media platforms must be incorporated.
Yet another vital aspect of SEO is to pay attention to the mobile version of the website. A) Get a mobile version or an app for your website, if you don't have one already. B) Promote it well to be easily noticeable. It is no secret that smartphones are taking over the conventional computers. Stay in touch with times by already having an optimized mobile version of your website.
Now, paying attention to the latest Penguin update is crucially important while framing your SEO strategies for the coming year. The traditional methods used in SEO like article sites, blog comments, forum posts etc. might not be as effective as they were a couple of years back. The emphasis on good quality content was never so pronounced as it is now. Refreshing the website content and providing the readers with fresh, original and informative blog posts frequently seem to be the best way out. Guest blog posts are the new rage and they seem to be doing good. Merely a huge amount of backlinks might be no longer useful, in a manner of saying, you have to earn them.
They say the right way is the hard way, so it is now for SEO. it need not be unnecessarily expensive but it needs to be done properly, it might be time consuming. What one requires is consistency with quality, a mix of different strategies. Relying merely on one function might do more harm than good. Know your website and try to understand the kind of SEO that would be good for it.