Out With The Old & In With The New!
The SEO market is changing. As I mentioned in “3 SEO Changes Rattle SEOs and Bloggers Alike“, these changes are for the better but not necessarily easy!
When SEO first started, you could rank just by keyword-stuffing your meta tags. Once that was phased out, there was a period when you could easily get ranked by link spamming. Those days are over as well. Both of those practices will now get you penalized not rewarded!
Today, SEO is rapidly moving in a new direction. Here are some of the many trends active in today’s world of SEO.
==> Moving Away: Keyword Density, Keyword Strategies
There were a few strategies that were popular a few years ago that simply don’t matter today.
Keyword density more or less doesn’t matter anymore. A few years ago, experts recommended trying to keep your keyword density somewhere around 3% to 6%. Today, it truly doesn’t matter so much.
In the past experts also recommended bolding your keywords in places or using your keywords in your subheads. Again, this doesn’t play as much of a role as it did in the past.
Like keyword stuffing of old, today severe “over-optimization” can actually hurt you!
Keywords still matter however and being smart about them will help you in many ways.
==> Moving Towards: Multimedia
Using videos, audio and web presentations is becoming an increasingly effective way to gain rankings in the search engines.
Building a strong reputation using multimedia takes time. The idea isn’t to try and launch one viral video and be set for life. Instead, the idea is to do a podcast every week, or a video every week until you have a solid reputation built.
The more often you can publish, the better. High quality videos and audios generate a lot of backlinks, especially once you have a strong reputation.
Not only is YouTube’s voice recognition technology leading to increased SEO relevance for videos… but the ability to upload a “closed caption” text script gives Google everything it needs!
==> Moving Away: Low Quality Links
Many of the low quality link tactics that worked even just a year ago are weighed very lowly today.
For example, links from article marketing are weighed very lowly today. Writing a bunch of articles and sending them to EzineArticles or GoArticles simply won’t do all that much for your rankings. In fact, EzineArticles itself was hit very hard by Panda in 2011 (though it is starting to recover).
Another example is social media profile links. Links from easy-to-create profiles no longer send much link juice. The same goes for comment links when compared to editorial links.
Many people think link building is dead which is far from the truth. Plentiful, high quality backlinks remain a leading factor in SEO but the old methods of attaining them such as link farms and purchased links are dead.
==> Moving Towards: Quality Indicator Metrics
Google is using more and more metrics to try and determine whether or not your site is a high quality website.
How does Google do this?
One metric it looks at is how often people come back to your site. It looks at how often people stay on your website. It looks at the ratio of content to advertisement on your site.
Another way is to look at social indicators such as number of tweets, number of Google+ shares, number of Likes…. and in particular if any of those came from “influencers” in your industry.
Google looks at literally hundreds of different factors and tries to determine whether or not your site is high quality.
As I mentioned here, there are a number of ways to improve the way Google views you and it important to keep this in mind!
It’s very hard to fool Google’s artificial intelligence, especially since so little is known about it today. The best way to rank in the new world of SEO is to just give Google what it wants: high quality content and real relationship connections.
