SEO Trends Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know for 2014

"Is SEO dead?" It's a common question within the online marketing world today.
If you're an entrepreneur relying on a strong online presence to connect with customers, you're right to pay attention. It's undeniable that the SEO landscape is changing.
For instance, Google is taking a hardline approach. Shady link-building tactics, poor quality content and bad design are just a few of the factors causing websites to get penalized. So what's worked for your business in the past may no longer work, and in fact, could actually hurt your business now.
Today, successful SEO strategies have to incorporate diverse components including brand building, mobile optimization, content marketing and social media integration. It's time to adapt your strategy to address these realities. Here's a closer look at five trends that will shape your SEO success in the year ahead.

1. Effective SEO has three pillars. A strong SEO strategy has three core components: links, content and social media. What's become more pronounced in the last year is the relationship between these elements. Content must be laser focused on your audience's needs and honed to drive specific profit-generating actions. Social media amplifies your reach, signaling to search engines that users find your content valuable. Links from high quality sites also reinforce that you're a solid, trustworthy site. A virtuous cycle is starting to emerge that all begins with writing great content.

2. The rise of content marketing moves toward digital maturity. Content marketing was the top marketing buzzword of 2013, and it's a trend that's here to stay. Brands need to become savvy about telling their own stories and creating content that resonates with audiences. As the initial fascination with content marketing wears off, marketers are now demanding more return on investment, or ROI. Content marketing is maturing, and as a result we're better able to effectively target content, measure performance and correct course to improve results.

3. Mobile optimization is no longer optional. With the release of Google's Hummingbird updates, it's getting harder for sites without a mobile strategy to rank well. This includes both a responsive design and a mobile content strategy. Realistically, it's time to invest in this anyway from a business perspective: Half of Americans own smartphones and more than a third own tablets according to Pew Internet. Responsive design ensures that your site looks great across a range of mobile devices. A mobile content strategy targets your content to the context, needs and behaviors of mobile users. To learn more about post-Hummingbird mobile optimization, read The Key Ingredients to a Winning Mobile Content-Marketing Strategy.

4. Building your brand is more important than building links. A strong brand is playing an increasingly important role in SEO. One tangible example is Google's introduction and emphasis of Google Authorship, a program that connects content to your author profile with recognized authors' content performing better in search engine results. Building your brand and thought leadership in your space are critical steps to ranking well over time. For help building and implement a branding strategy, see this collection of resources.

5. Social media, especially Google Plus, plays an integrated role with SEO. Google is relying more than ever on human signals in the form of shares and mentions on social media to help vet sites. If you don't have a strong social media marketing presence and a strategy that makes it easy for people to share your content, it's time to implement one (for help with that, I recommend "How to Determine Which Social Media Network Fits Your Business."

Social media has matured to the point where it's intersecting with SEO to help determine search rankings. Two easy places to start are building your Google Plus presence and ensuring that your website and blog have content sharing modules built in.
As you're developing your company's SEO plan, remember that all these trends add up to two things: integration and balance. Invest in all the key areas -- from writing good content, to building links and developing your social platforms -- with the understanding that they mutually support each other. Customize your plan by identifying your company's gaps and opportunity, and focus on the channels that bring you closer to your audience. Good search engines rankings will follow.

Upcoming SEO Trends in 2013 & 2014 – Predictions & Strategies

All of you have already known about latest Google penguin 2.0 (released on May 22, 2013) and Panda 26(confirmed on July 18, 2013) updates which already adversely affected many search queries in search results. Do you know only penguin 2.0 update has already noticeably affected 2.3% English search queries in SERP? Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Web Spam, already confirmed that Google will be more strict and rolling out more updates for preventing spamming on web and for enhancing user experiences.

So it’s high time, you decided what SEO strategies you will follow to keep improving your search engine ranking or at least get rid of de-ranking in search results before rolling out next algorithm updates.

What We Have Learned from Penguin 2.0 Update:

After rolling out penguin 2.0 update, it’s now clear that:

• Google is discouraging buying and selling links (paid links) and also paying lesser weight on paid links than before.
• Google is not going to tolerate spam anymore and that’s why will deal with more harshly with spam link building
• More weight is being given on compelling contents.

Predictions about SEO Trends in 2013-2014:

SEO trends in 2013-2014 would be mostly influenced by what will be the next Panda & Penguin updates.  But it’s not possible to exactly forecast what will be the SEO trends in 2013-2014.

Though it’s quite difficult to anticipate what Google will announce in their next updates, but it’s sure that those updates will be more comprehensive and deeper targeting than the previous iteration of algorithm. Although the upcoming SEO trends can’t be exactly estimated, but here I am going to share some most probable estimates that will always be pretty effective for getting your desired outcomes, whatever the algorithm updates would be.

“Complete Content” Continues to Play an Important Role:

Unique and valuable content is a must for better ranking and this would be the same for 2013-2014 season. If you really want to attain authority value for your website and wish to rank in the 1^st position of SERP, you have to ensure that you have not only unique, but also detailed contents in your website. Your contents must be able to answer all the WH questions (what, when. Where, how, etc.) that might arise in your visitors’ mind. Otherwise visitors will go to other websites to know more about the topic. You may add expert’s opinion, testimonials, related videos and whatever else in your website to make the contents ‘complete articles’ to your audience. In a word, your contents should reflect your expertise on the topic.

Backlinks are Still Important, Though Quality Parameters are Getting More Strict:

Google has clearly mentioned that it dislikes unnatural and massive link building. This search engine giant has also confirmed that they are working on creating more effective tools for analyzing link quality. Google likes to see websites having natural backlinks from related sites. Analyzing algorithm updates of last couple of years, it seems like natural links would get more weight than paid and irrelevant links in 2013-2014.

More Focus on Diversified Contents:

Contents can be of texts, images or videos. You might already have seen that Google has different search parameters for displaying text, video and image contents. So don’t focus only on articles, but also try to use high quality videos, images and infographics (high quality in terms of usefulness, not high resolution) to get better ranking of your site.

Social Media Popularity Continue to Be Important:

Social engagement and popularity is one of the crucial ranking factors in these days and hope it would be the same in the year 2013-2014. Social media make Google believe that the contents of your website are really useful and that’s why they are being shared over social sites which help obtain better ranking in SERP. So you should concentrate on branding your site’s social media pages and groups for improving your websites social ranking in the upcoming days. Adding social media buttons in your website will make it very much easier for people to share your contents in various social media.

Diversify Keywords Used For Anchor Text:

You shouldn’t use a single keyword again and again as your anchor text while linking to your contents. The same is applicable to both internal as well as external linking. For example: if your website gets 100 backlinks using the same anchor text whether they are from different domains, Google would consider it as spamming or unnatural linking. If you are working on single keyword ‘hair oil’, for instance, you may use diversified keywords like ‘best hair oil’, ‘hair oil for men’, ‘hair oil for all’, etc. This practice will definitely work in this 2013-2014 season.

Presentation and Design to Support Your Contents:

User experience (UX) plays a vital role in better ranking of websites in these days. If your website contains unique and detailed contents but with unprofessional or bad presentation, this is not going to work anymore in these upcoming days. If you have useful informative contents, you should concentrate on having professional design and presentations too to enrich your website users’ experiences. If you do so, this will automatically work for enhancing the users’ experience of Google, you know what I mean.

Mobile Compatibility of Your Site is A Must:

Do you know that approximately 45 million people are using mobile internet in these days? According to some web researchers, more than 1.9 billion people will be accessing websites using mobile internet within next couple of years. That’s the reason why having responsive web design is a must for your website. You have to ensure that your website is accessible and perfectly viewable from various devices, whether it is tablet, smart phone or any other devices. Otherwise, your website users won’t be able to access or satisfy with your site and may leave the site which ultimately negatively affect your ranking in the upcoming days.
Yap, there are some other methods that I should discuss apart from what I already have discussed in the above section. I would like to hear from you about any other SEO strategies or techniques that you have already applied or you think should be considered. Thank you.

Just mobilize your SEO with latest tricks

Mobile SEO could be called as the lasted buzzword in the world of internet marketing. This has become more important especially when you see Google claiming that the mobile online traffic is soon going to surpass the PC web based traffic by the next year. At such junctures, the mobile internet marketing strategies are difficult to neglect. 

With the mobile marketing quickly becoming the part and parcel of the online marketing strategy, customizing your SEO practices with some of the latest tricks has become the modern day mantra of successful marketing. Hence if you fail to have a tangible kind of SEO strategy for your online marketing, you are more likely to lose your potential revenues to a great extent. Hence it’s high time you mobilize you search engine optimization with some latest tips and tricks, with few of these given below.

Try fundamental SEO best strategies
Website optimization is vital both for your mobile and computer based sites. Both follow the same types of rules especially when you deal with keywords, content, links and accessibility. As long as you are sticking to all these practices is concerned, adapting these to fit over the market of mobile shouldn’t be a big problem. 

If you are seen struggling hard with your desktop optimization efforts, you are more likely required to allocate more time in fixing them first followed by using it like a template for all your mobile optimization best techniques. Working over these strategies separately is simply going to waste your valuable time, which you invest while getting clients.

Mobilize your existing website
Though you could think of doing a couple of changes to make your current site a mobile friendly website, however, considering the need and impact about mobile marketing, having a new dedicated mobile site is always a good idea to bank with. Before you put your time and energy in creating a new dedicated mobile site, make sure you use a mobile version of your current website just to get a fair idea about its ease of use. 

With smartphones gradually replacing the old cell phones, you would like to custom your website to fit into the smartphone users’ basket. As the mobile users are more likely to see the sites, which they used previously over the desktop browser you could choose between making some changes in your current site or by having a full time mobile site. Regardless of the option you go with, better ensure a fact that your customers should be able to access your site in the same way they did over their desktop computers.

Making the keywords more mobile friendly
The keywords over the mobile environment are often 25 percent shorter than the usual desktop searches and most of the search engines usually give the mobile users the filtering choice, while they do not entirely rely on that. Yet, you need to trim the number of keywords usage simply to fit over your mobile criteria just to avoid losing out people via random search engine option.

Making your mobile content richer
As the mobile site requires fewer words and smaller spaces, hence you are supposed to convert all your 400 words descriptions into 150 word content, which speak the same thing in a more effective way to impress the mobile users. 

The mobile users always are in hurry as they check different things while being in the red light signal or during few free moments in their meetings, hence the content you produce for such people should be straight, simple and to the point. But at the same time, make sure you do not compromise on the quality of the content. Though this may pose as a challenge, but it happens to be the most vital aspects of mobilizing your website.

Updating your design layouts
Your mobile site has to be designed in such a way that the users should be able to view it should be able to fulfill their purposes. As these are smaller views, hence when you put too much stuff over the mobile designed paged, it simply makes the navigation part difficult for the users. Hence you are supposed to add better writing to express your information in a much smaller amount of words. But at the same time, you are supposed to retain the meaning unlike the desktop version.

Final word
With constant rise of mobile users accessing the web, it is important to convert your site into this new format. Adding a couple of mobilizing SEO tips as discussed above could help you in remaining in this new arena of internet marketing.

Social Media Marketing Trends In 2014

Social media will continue to play a central role in marketers´ day-to-day work over the course of this year. But many of them are pondering over the development of social marketing over the next months. Kristin Brewe, the IAB´s director of marketing and communications and chair of the Social Media Council, is just the right person to offer an insight into the matter.

Writing in a blog post on IAB´s website, Brewe noted a few key trends that social media marketing is likely to follow in 2013. Measurement will remain a key focus for businesses, as many have so far found performance and ROI measurement quite elusive. A recent poll from the IAB showed that more than a quarter of respondents had no clue how their organisations measured social performance, with only 17% of those interviewed measuring ROI on social sites activity.

As news and messages in general travel at the speed of sound on social media, it is becoming nearly impossible to hide the truth. Brands need to be more truthful than ever because social media makes their business transparent and exposed like never before. Communicating honestly with customers and being open to criticism is the right approach, Brewe claimed.

While the majority of brands are playing it safe by creating brand pages on big, well-established platforms, the alternative is also worth giving it a thought. Brands willing to take a risk might venture into creating their own platforms, with their own community, as this will undoubtedly make them stand out from the crowd.

The bottom line is that the social media outlook is very good despite the challenges brands face. It gives unrivalled opportunities for creating valuable relationships between brands and consumers, Brewe concluded.

SEO Industry Trends: A Look at What’s Ahead for SEO in 2014

Now that most of us have our footing back after Penguin 2.0, what’s ahead for SEO and social media marketing in the year to come? It’s clear that Google’s focus is on eliminating spam and enhancing the user experience through better content. Evidence has shown that both site quality and link relevancy are going to be big players in the next twelve months. But comments from Google and forecasting from a number of different SEO experts suggest that other changes are on the horizon.
Here’s my best guess of where we can expect SEO to go for the rest of 2013 and throughout 2014 – and my top tips on how to prepare. Just to add a standard disclaimer: prediction posts are at best guesses. I’ll be updating this post periodically as more information becomes available, and look forward to your thoughts and insights as well.

1. Content continues to be important, but requires more depth and detail
The days when you could publish 500-word pieces on your blog a couple times a week and achieve authority status are fading away. While high quality, shorter pieces still have value, I predict we’ll see a migration toward “super articles.” Longer pieces that are a minimum of 1,000 words and more likely upwards of 2,000 will become increasingly valuable.
It’s what Neil Patel has called “epic content.” There’s several ways to approach this. If the best articles in your niche offer 50 ideas, your round-ups could offer 100. You could get access to experts, develop detailed tutorials, or supplement your content with high quality videos or images. The key is going to be to follow an approach that sets you apart from the most basic content in your space, and grabs people’s interest for the long-term. The focus is on depth, quality, and ultimate value to the reader.

2. Different kinds of content help you get traction
Whether you’re looking at creating video, developing infographics, or launching interactive quizzes, thinking beyond blog posts and free reports will give you a distinct advantage. As buzzwords like guest posting and content strategy become more and more ubiquitous, it’s important that you do whatever you can to rise above the noise. In addition to committing to do what it takes to write sticky, authoritative content, another strategy will be diversifying the type of content that you publish.
Of course, this connects to your ability to disseminate content in creative ways. There’s only so many ways to share a blog post. But a video can be syndicated to dozens of different sites, added to a branded channel on YouTube, embedded on Pinterest, and more.
Another important factor is your ability to appear in different verticals of search — for example, videos or images — as overall search architecture moves in that direction. A more diverse content base will help you rank more effectively for your target terms.

3. Author authority matters
It’s not just the quality of a single piece of content that matters, but rather your entire body of work. By using Google Authorship and other behind-the-scenes techniques, Google is developing better mechanisms for learning about everything you write. This develops an overall picture of what you’ve accomplished, and what subjects you’re qualified to speak on.
The overall number of social signals your content is generating, how frequently you’re posting, and the quality of sites you’re connected to, this will impact the rankings of the content that you post going forward. To establish your authority, make sure you’re leveraging Google Authorship not only with your regular core content, but also with guest posts that you contribute to other sites in your industry.

4. Links remain critical, but the bar for quality keeps going up
In a video in May, Matt Cutts suggested that Google’s continuing to develop more sophisticated adjustments to the algorithm to measure link quality and thwart link spammers. This evokes the idea of link wheels – creating networks of hub and spoke sites, along with many levels of intermediary sites, in order to build links. The idea is that if they’re dispersed and deep enough, that the connections between them will be masked. It a nutshell, these approaches aren’t effective anymore and will become less so moving forward.
While Google’s already focused on this, ever more sophisticated versions of this approach – from paid advertorials to private blog networks – will continue to be important targets in the war of spam. Not only will we all be taking a retrospective look at our link profiles, but strategizing how to build links in the future will require more ingenuity and planning. Link building is moving in the direction of a relationship-based process.

5. Diversifying link text is ongoing
One of the areas t hit by Penguin 2.0 was sites where anchor text was too optimized. Experts estimated that if more than 30% of your anchor text was identical, it was easy to see that you were actively building links in a way that might be manipulative. Instead, now and going forward, it’s more important to think about linking from an organic perspective.
For example, say your site is currently focused on the topic of Twitter marketing. People discussing your site and linking to it are likely to use a variety of terms: Twitter marketing, marketing on Twitter, Twitter for business, social media marketing on Twitter, and more. There are a number of terms that are all within the realm of a reasonable anchor text choice.
It’s important to develop campaigns that help you post links with a range of different anchor text. Diversifying your link text takes time, especially if you have a significant body of links to your site. I anticipate that we’ll see many website owners working on this in the year ahead.  For an overview on proper anchor text strategy in a post-Penguin 2.0 environment,

6. Great design matters
Great design is a key piece of the user experience. Top-quality design helps overcome the trust barrier that comes up when people first visit your site. If your site looks professional, they’re more likely to believe that your business is legitimate and give you the time and money you’re working hard to earn. Another key factor is driving conversions. Good design helps drive users in whatever direction you want them to go – signing up for your email list, buying your products, or reading and sharing your content.
Design is also a very effective tool for helping build both your authority and your epic content backlog. Is your picture on your website? Do people associate your name and face with high quality content? If so, you’re on the right track. Is design supporting the quality of your tutorials? You can instantly upgrade people’s perceptions of your work by integrating screen shots, videos, and more. It’s a simple way to increase the value of your content.

7. Guest posting comes under increasing scrutiny
One of the most popular means of building links right now is guest posting. It’s a great way to build links, cultivate relationships with other thinkers in your field, and get your material in front of new audiences. The challenge with guest posting is when it’s treated as the “new method of article marketing.” I think we can expect increasing scrutiny from Google on guest posts.
What this means for writers and website owners is that it’s important to pay attention to the quality of the sites where you post. PageRank and Domain authority are two metrics to measure quality. Another is to look and see if these sites have the kind of human signals that make a reputable site – an engaged audience, social shares, and links from other high quality sites. When you do guest post, it’ll be important to put an extra emphasis on developing valuable contributions that really resonate with the target audience.

8. Social continues to exert a powerful influence
Social media isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s gaining a great deal of traction. With the introduction of Google Plus two years ago, it was easy to see that social signals were becoming more important to search. As one expert said, “human rank is hard to game.” By increasing the influence of social media signals, the search engines are essentially outsourcing the manual evaluation process of content to a large extent.
For companies working to rank their content, it’ll be important to ensure they have branded accounts for their sites. Plugins or other mechanisms need to be used in order to make content easily sharable, and to measure social shares. Social media promotion needs to be a front-line priority in your individual content promotion plans, and overall innovative approaches (for example, experimenting with exclusive social content or competitions) used to increase your social reach and influence.

9. Mobile performance and compatibility matter
During an interview with Search Engine Journal, Matt Cutts noted the importance of having a lean mobile site that loaded quickly. Building on that, mobile is no longer optional. Half of all people in the U.S. own a smartphone; one third of internet users own a tablet. Soon, more people will routinely access the Internet via a mobile device than the number of people who do so via a desktop computer.
Having a mobile compatible site is the new minimum threshold. Important aspects include cross-device compatibility and optimizing your designs for mobile conversions. Thinking about mobile productively requires a mindset shift. Mobile isn’t just about making sales. Instead, it’s about a broader set of potential conversions – visits, gathering information for in-store visits, signing up for more information – that require you to focus on the mobile channel.
Besides mobile-ready design, website speed is becoming more important. As the average internet user expects faster speeds, they have less patience. Frustration over slow-loading websites leads to a poorer user experience, which is why website load speed is one of the growing factors in Google’s ranking algorithm. Cloud CDN (content delivery network) hosting solutions are seeing a rise in popularity due to this trend, and for good reason.

10. SEO is less tactics, more strategy
It’s fair to say that this has been the direction of SEO for a long time now, but it’s becoming increasingly true. Tactics – specific ways to build links or to write code – are becoming less and less valuable. Instead, the focus is shifting to your long-term strategy. What’s your content strategy? What’s your link building strategy? What’s your authority strategy? What’s your social strategy? These individual pieces all link together to create the foundation a successful site presence is built on.
It doesn’t mean that tactics don’t matter. After all, tactical moves are how you implement a strategy. Your choices between different kinds of tactics, such as white hat link building or black hat link building, can make all the difference. But if tactics aren’t driven by an overall strategy that’s implementing multiple approaches at the same time, they’re less likely to work. Approaches to SEO need to be cohesive.

Conclusion
I’m sure that there are critical trends that I’ve missed. I’d love to hear from you. What’s working for you right now, and where are you focusing your efforts in the next year? Let me know in the comments below!