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