2013 SEO Strategy: An Approach For Years Ahead

Posted On : July 31st, 2013   By : Dillip Kumar Mohanty   To : Google

SEO is dead. Sure? Correction please… SEO is TRANSFORMING.

The vibration of the phrase “SEO is dead” is so frequent in SEO world that sometimes we have to give it a second thought. Is it really possible? Even after Panda & Penguin algorithm updates, many SEOs have accepted this as true. So, at the middle of 2013, it is good to ponder over this fact or myth, whatever side you are.

The shifting of focus from search engine to users: In general, most of SEO tactics of past years were based on influencing the search engines for better ranking in SERP. The base rule was “RANKING”. It was like optimizing for the search engines; no focus was given to users. From the users’ point of view, SEO was nothing more than spamming. The common practice was to assume the ranking factors categorically and optimize in that respect to quickly ascend the ranking ladder. SEO was meant to be centered on PR, back-links, article spinning & submission, directory submission, profile linking, social bookmarking. And all of these were done in huge numbers for placing links only. If these were created naturally, it would have taken many years. But old school SEO made it possible within few months. As linking was the prime goal, there was hardly any time to share any quality information for users. So, managing SEO strategy was very simple once one had a huge database of blogs, forums etc. & these were easily available anywhere. Many SEOs still prefer to be in this comfort zone.

IF YOU STILL BUILD YOUR SEO STRATEGY ON THESE MINDSETS, THEN REALLY SEO IS DEAD FOR YOU.

So, the best way of survival is to realign your overall SEO strategy with the current marketing trend rather than formulating assumption over correlation data regarding ranking factors. Try to think like a user, what a user actually want & whether your site fulfills the requirement of a user. Off-site promotion without on-site optimization & quality results in 100% bounce rate only. Focus your mind on quality, uniqueness, trust building & branding. When your old SEO strategy will be blended with these factors, then you are welcome to the business; you earn a place here in 2013 & beyond. As long as search engines are there to crawl the web to feed their database so as to offer results in form of web address, SEO will be there in service but in different form depending on the contemporary rules of the game decided by the search engines.

Gaining knowledge… following intuition

Most of us must have heard the discussion about whether SEO is a science or art somewhere in web. I am not going to the basic definition of science or arts here as my primary concern is the face of SEO in 2013. For me, the past age of SEO is more like science as then we were more interested in developing SEO strategy by conducting research, analyzing the vast data collected regarding ranking factor.

But the present SEO should be more like a mixture of science & arts as we have to think innovative ways to reach to the prospective customers for natural development. Our aim should be to make the promotion go viral. For this you should be an expert in your niche by gaining niche-related day-to-day basis new development and the impact on the market due to such changes as you have to adjust your focus in accordance to your targeted traffic. You have to think creatively, must follow your own intuition to decide your SEO strategy.

I bet your intuition will guide you in the right direction. By intuition, I don’t mean that we should avoid the facts visible clearly. Your intuition may not help you for optimizing your site design if you are not an expert. But regarding contents in different pages of your site, theme, colors like non-technical aspects, you are the best judge. Also the social promotion should be more like creative flow rather than measuring the social success calculated figure of followers, friends, likes or shares etc. These are natural outcome of your quality & popularity. By continuous gain in diverse knowledge on your niche, your intuition will become stronger as time moves. Be a free thinker rather than piling of facts in your brain. Intuition will definitely help you if you have true love for what you are doing. And I think this love factor plays an important place in your success.

Link Building v/s Link Earning

THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH.

Whenever someone utters the phrase link earning, the above line comes to mind instantly. My question is, “Is it possible to earn links without building first?” Never. Whatever be the quality of your site or your content, you have to build links both for users and search engines to let them know your presence. Once they know & measure your quality, then the link earning process will begin. You can’t earn a single link without building some. Yes, link earning is possible if and only if you have already gained popularity factor. But again think how you have acquired that popularity. Better follow a good link building strategy to earn links in future in a natural way.

ALL DEPEND ON HOW & WHERE YOU BUILD LINKS NOT HOW MUCH YOU BUILD LINKS.

Here again we come to the same stuff of quality over quantity what exactly Google is trying to share with us. Even if you follow blog commenting, forum posting, article writing, guest posting etc from old school SEO, these are not going to create problem as long as you will do these with certain limitation. Panda & Penguin are not there to behave instantly like “Hey, that site got a link from a low quality site. Let bite him hard.” Google is not a fool that’s why it prefers to diminish the value of those factors which have higher probability of being subjected to manipulation rather than penalizing those who are playing with these. Google knows the intricacies of link metrics. Even your links can be placed in low quality sites by users unintentionally or you may be a victim of negative SEO. Google is very sensitive with it ranking factors and put sufficient thought before doing any changes in its algorithm.

So, the question is how and where you should build links. Let me provide some outlines on this.

  • Make a great site for best user experience.
  • Uniqueness is the key to success.
  • Know the purpose of building the site. Try to figure out what type of users you want to welcome to your site.
  • Be an active and contributing member in that sphere (blogs, socials, forums etc.) where your prospective users are active.
  • Focus on how qualitatively you engage there not on how much.
  • Try to help the users in those places without any self interest.
  • Don’t force your links there. Be relevant and share your links if and only if these will help the users in a certain way.
  • Try to be a good learner & listener that help you to grow your knowledge base and will turn you into an authoritative figure for greater influence in future.

In my opinion, your link building strategy should be involved (qualitatively) around the above theme. If you follow minutely, then link earning process will start naturally.

MAKE THE WEB A BETTER SEARCHING PLACE AND YOU ARE THE WINNER.

Dillip Kumar Mohanty

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