The general consensus of the year 2012 for internet marketers was “phooey!”. Google updates, panda, penguin seemed to effect the vast majority of us. This has now brought upon the SEO profession a new service called “Link Removal”. Link removal is a practice in which a company, person, or team will go around the web taking down potential links that may be hurting your rankings in the search engines. While most were still lost in the Social marketplace, SEO and Social is continually verging into one in regards to rankings and the effects they play on each other.
Did you feel like 2012 made you want to drop out of the race? Let’s keep the door open shall we:
^ According to Google themselves, in 2011 Google had almost 2 trillion searches done on their search engine.
^ 90%+ of internet users use a search engine
^ More than half of internet users use a search engine daily
^ 70%+ of internet users purchase products online
^ ~80% research on the inner-webs before they purchase a product or service
Statistic Verification
Source: Google Official History, ComScore
Date Verified: 7.14.2012
Year
Google Searches Annually
Average Daily Searches
2011
1,722,071,000,000
4,717,000,000
2010
1,324,670,000,000
3,627,000,000
2009
953,700,000,000
2,610,000,000
2008
637,200,000,000
1,745,000,000
2007
438,000,000,000
1,200,000,000
2000
22,000,000,000
60,000,000
1998
3,600,000 *Googles official first year
9,800
Let’s filter out the hype, hearsay, and rumors and stick with what are sustainable SEO tactics and techniques:
Improve The Measurement Of Your Metrics
When you begin a new project, or are working on an existing project it is always great to define your goals and define what success means to this campaign. Failure to define these metrics will hurt you in the long run with a decreased ROI, and wastefully allocating your time, resources, and money in the wrong areas.
– Brand awareness vs. “organic” SEO visits – What SEO means to me, my clients, and hopefully the rest of the industry is obtaining new visits to a website via informative or purchase intent type keywords. – Benchmarking on and off page SEO – Prior to starting your campaign you are going to want to benchmark your metrics and your competition. After you choose which keywords you are going after, you may then move forward with organizing your competitors and bring in the metrics you need to analyze your on and off page statistics. You shortcomings will be obvious after you gather you statistics. – Track Your Phone Calls – Google utilizes a tracking script if you choose to utilize Google Adwords. It’s a great resource and tool you should take advantage of. Other methods of tracking your phone calls is to have a different phone number for each and every ad campaign you are running. This might get expensive.
Have A Content Marketing Strategy
Keep in mind that a solid, sustainable, long lasting content strategy is both strategy and tactic. Your content must have great researchers, awesome writers, and pump out content that is engaging and related to your users. Publish your content on the many niche specific and general social media outlets, guest blog, and any other type of media you can possibly muster out that adds value to the industry.
Obtain Quality Links
If we learned anything from 2012 we learned that Google is leaning less on quantity and more on quality. That goes for both on page and off page SEO. Keep the following Tips in mind:
– Get links that are on quality root domains rather than focusing on many links from 1 particular website. – Pay attention to Domain Authority of domains that are linking to you. You work hard for your content, don’t waste it on low quality domains. The higher the DA the better. You can find the DA by downloading the SEOmoz Toolbar, or visit their tool opensiteexplorer.org – Get active in Social Media. I know this is difficult for most of you and aren’t even sure how to measure it. At least tweet every now and again, update your home page blog at least 2 times per week, get some likes, +1’s, or shares in one form or another.
Snippets And Signals
This one is simple. Use them! Set up your Google+ authorship profile, use schema.org to markup your address information etc. Take advantage of these valuable tools provided to you by Google, they can’t hurt and will at minimum help you increase you’re CTR in the Search Engines!
Study, re-read, and implement these solid strategy and tactics for 2013 and you are off to a sustainable SEO start for the 1st quarter of 2013.
Henry writes for texaseo.com with offices in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio Texas. Henry loves to help the community grow with rich, engaging, value adding content. Henry currently resides in Texas. Texas SEO has industry experience since 2005.
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