Top 5 Changes to SEO in 2013

1. Blogging Author Ranking

2. On Page SEO

3. Geo-Centric Optimization

4. Mobile Sites & Mobile Apps

5. Social Media Influence

1)      Blogging Transformation from Publisher Rank to Author Ranking:

Google AuthorRank will play a great influence on the overall PageRank of websites and their blogs. Author Ranking seeks to eliminate sites that pay for services that link or have articles often containing duplicate content coming from “high authority bloggers.”  The 3 primary areas this Author Rank will evaluate are the Interactions (includes relevant links to pages that become popular, amount of shares/comments, posts or contributing writers post/engagements from social media. Topics – if a “high authority author” is writing multiple blogs about various topics and has links – the old way of rating them as “a high authority” will likely decrease as new standards are put in place.  There is a lot of industry talk about how Google will be scaling a bloggers authentication to their website and analyzing the topics they are writing about.  This will without a doubt impact “high authority bloggers” as the algorithms and standards being put in place.  A true blogger should be seen as an expert on their subject matter which should revolve around an industry or specific topic/theme.  The aforementioned two then create the third dynamic being Popularity.  Are the topics generating audience and engagement, views etc?  How popular over time links on those blogs become popular trends, topics or as stated webpages/resources.

2)      On Page SEO:

On Page SEO seems to be increasing in how bots are crawling and indexing webpages and algorithms are determining the overall ranking pages, whereas it before a lot of it was determined on back links, site traffic, anchor texts and variables that were easy to manipulate.  Some companies out there did just that, which evolved the Blackhat industry.  Major search engines are seemingly shifting the scalability of On-Page or On-Site Optimization, META Data, Unique Content (does it read normal to a viewer), Site Map (easy to navigate), Rich Snippet Tags, webpage load times (does it take forever to load), analyzing now the links to your website (are they relevant), HTML coding, duplicate content, structured data and many more to determine the sites success in SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) visibility.

3)      Geo-Centric Focus:

As search engines continued to build their own infrastructure, the technology during this time was minimal and limited in allowing engines to quickly and efficiently identify the particular region, or  location from which people were searching for things.  Thus many people catered 1 Keyword with maybe 35 cities attached to it, so 1 keyword would become 36 separate keywords.  Take that times 10-15 keywords, you now have hundreds of keywords.  From there evolved the infamous "keyword stuffing" evolution. Today is a different story, for companies who do or do not use Geo-Targeted PPC (Pay-Per-Click), the expansion of Mobile devices, tablets, and synchronization with major Search Engines like Google, are continuing to play a major influence on SERP.  With that have come the evolving micro-formats that experts like Fasturtle should be able to incorporate into your website code to further allow those searching from mobile or portable devices to see results that are within their Geo-centric sphere.  It is not known what the radius of that sphere is (or if it’s even standardized) but many experts speculate the Geo-target (sphere) varies based on factors such as Address & Physical Location, Category of Business (how many businesses in a given area are registered under that category), Customer Reviews and Verified Business Listings in Directories.  Geo-Targeted AdWords and PPC are also going more and more Geo-Targeted, with a focus allowing marketers to better specify location based Ads.  Social media is increasing their base for ads that are specific to locations as well.

4)      Mobile Sites & Mobile Apps:

Increased traffic to the internet is increasing with the help of mobile based technology.  Having a website that is mobile friendly and allows users to engage your product, service or site is an absolute necessity in 2013.  Google Mobile Development recommends the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices and using only CSS media queries to decide the rendering on each device.  Google does state they support having your content being served using a different HTML or URL such as an m.site if it is properly coded with proper codes that again your website hosts or providers should be able to adhere to.  Mobile apps are another popular tool many business are using to drive revenue and make it easier for their customers to quickly get information and purchase right from their device.

“If you haven’t thought about what your site looks like on mobile you better start. Also, site speed – making your site fast is good for users, and it gives an SEO edge.” – Matt Cutts SMX Conference March 2013.

5)      Social Media:

Social media will not only play a tremendous role in marketing aspect of businesses but also the business reputation.  Many of the bigger search engines are now building and deploying Social Rankings that will essentially identify users that are engaging in business pages or even their own profiles and scale that to the frequency of others taking about, reviewing or sharing posts from businesses, products or advertisements.  Part of this effort will in essence minimize RSS feeds – if your audience is following your twitter, Facebook and Blog but EVERY time you make a post it’s the same post or RSS fed why would that audience continue to follow all three?  Stastistically, RSS based posts give less returns than unique posts depending on your industry and business size.  It will be vital to ensure you are utilizing your social media in creative, unique and engaging like formats.  While the signals or equations that determine this are not yet in full effect, rest assured its coming.