In today’s Internet industry, the rules of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are always changing. With the development of new search technologies, old techniques quickly become outmoded. Undoubtedly, the frequent sharing of content across social media like Facebook, Tweeter and Google+ has affected on the rules of SEO, and it is also the driving forces of SEO in 2013.
This is the point that Google has been carrying out its Panda and Penguin algorithm updates recently, which are aimed to weed out spam, irrelevant websites while focusing on websites that actually offer value to their visitors.
The New Rules of Linking
When running a website, webmasters use link farms and link trading to improve the search ranking. However, the backlink’s quality now is more important than the quantity. Thus, the backlinks from those respected or small but relevant websites can truly have positive effect on SEO.
It is suggested that guest blogging for created websites is a good to achieve that. Besides, content with great and plentiful internal links also tends to get higher search engine rankings, according to surveys.
The Influence of Social Media
Social media has become the most popular medium for sharing content across the web. That can help increase traffic to your website effectively, and pick up on by search engines if their content becomes hot on social media.
As a website owner, if you have not already to expand your reach, then you should create accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus.
Especially for Google authorship which allows authors to claim the online content they’ve written by connecting it to their Google+ account. And Google would look favorably upon the content. Claiming authorship is not only good for SEO, but also help to build online brand and reputation.
The Usage of Multimedia
Although word content plays a big role in SEO, multimedia method will attract more visitors for your website, actually. Diversify the website content with images, videos, and infographics that can arouse the interests of visitors. At the same time, do not forget to optimize you multimedia via:
- Using keywords in picture ALT tags, captions and file names
- Including a transcript of your video contents
Increased Usage of Mobile Device
In the past few years, mobile Internet usage has increased largely, and this trend would continue. The users use their devices to perform a variety of tasks, such as banking, accessing social media, shopping online and others.
Optimizing email communications, creating mobile app or using responsive design to take benefit from mobile traffic for your website.
Summary
Search engines are becoming smarter all the time, and it also increasing difficult to manipulate. Unlike years ago, now Google rewards websites with content that users share naturally on the web, instead of making so many efforts on keywords.
Generally, on-page SEO still influences rankings of the website. You just ensure the accurate reflection of your content, and that it’s supported by good backlinks and social sharing.