14
Dec
2011 SEO predicts: Did I get them right?
At the start of the year I wrote an article on what SEO factors
I thought would affect your rankings and traffic the most in
2011.
Today I’m going to review my predictions and see they came
true...
Predictions:
1. Social networking
I had high expectations for social networking in 2011. I
believed that Likes, Retweets and +1’s would become a more
prominent factor in Google’s algorithm and start to be
considered as more of a Backlink, rather than just a public
recommendation.
And I was right; many signals are now taken from social
networking sites. Comments and content within your profiles are
read by Google and Likes, Retweets and +1’s are becoming the
new backlinks.
This may not be to any extremes (links obviously still carry
more weight) but as the years go on I’m sure that social
networking will keep on becoming a stronger factor for SEO.
2. Local Search
Local search was huge in 2010, it allowed smaller businesses to
get high ranking websites faster as the keywords were a bit more
longtail.
Although Local Search is still very important for SEO, it
didn’t advance as much as I’d hoped.
3. E-marketing
This has always been a great marketing strategy and for the
majority of people I know that have been producing these on a
regular basis they have been a huge success especially for us.
Our Resource Techniques weekly newsletter draws in almost half
of our websites traffic, which has been gradually increasing over
the year but not only that it has promoted our Facebook and Twitter
business pages bringing in more followers and getting us an extra
20-30 likes, retweets and +1’s per week.
4. News Articles/Blogs
Again blogging has been around for years and can be great for
SEO. One of Google’s major algorithm changes this year was
‘Panda’.
Google’s Panda penalises websites with poor quality
content, which affected thousands of websites across the net mostly
due to duplicated content.
Google’s algorithm change proved the effectiveness of
blogging (if you do it right) making it more important than ever to
start producing articles for their website.
By Luke Stanley
SEO Consults
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