For search engine marketers — and the companies who depend on them — things just got a little tougher. SEO companies, most still reeling from the impact of Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, aren’t going to like what the CEO of LinkSmart reported in Forbes on Jan. 22.

It’s not just links that are taking a hit from Google — now keywords are in trouble too, according to Pete Sheinbaum, who was the CEO of Daily Candy before taking the helm at LinkSmart. Google put an end to the easy acquisition of links, which for more than a decade had been essential to search engine rankings.

Links remain important, but their overall value has diminished. Worse for SEO specialists, quality links have to be earned. Google stripped sites of many links they deemed forced, purchased or otherwise tainted and now makes it harder for sites to gain links. Content marketing and social media marketing are usurping SEO’s dominance in link-building as Google now rates links based on perceived value — a link from an article published in a high-authority magazine or shared on Twitter — gets more Google love than links from ezines and directories.

Google Shields Search Results Data

And now, Sheinbaum says in Forbes, keywords are also losing their importance in marketing.

Google isn’t discounting keywords as it did links. But it’s making it harder for websites and advertisers to know what keywords drive traffic. Google is keeping much of that information to itself and may become increasingly stingy about releasing it in the future, Sheinbaum says.

If, for example, your marketing strategy revolves around keywords such as “how to make money online,” you may be paying a search engine company to put those keywords in anchor text and spending money on pay-per-click advertising based on the phrase “how to make money online.”

Google is not stopping you from spending money this way, but the company is making it harder to track results. You may not know if someone visited your site because of the keywords or because of some random reason.

What happened? Google used to freely pass along reports about keywords. But for any site that uses Google analytics — and about 57 percent do, according to study by Optify — Google keeps this information private. This is good for Google — it acquires information for its own advertising purposes — but bad for other companies who sell advertising based on traffic and keywords.

This means that marketers and advertisers are going to have a harder time analyzing traffic on their websites — and justifying their rates to website owners. Owners who want to get the most out of their marketing dollars — and SEO companies who want to keep earning their fees — will have to look beyond raw data and try to look deeper into the meaning of traffic rises and dips.

If traffic rises on a Tuesday, falls two days later and picks up five days after that, simple data will no longer provide the reason. It will be necessary to examine what changed on Tuesday — content was published on a high-authority site or a new ad campaign launch — what happened in the four days of slower traffic and on the fifth when traffic picked up.

New Strategies Needed

Todd Mumford , CEO of SEO Visions, says the information in the Forbes article should not alarm search engine specialists. For one thing, he says, Google started shielding keyword information months ago and savvy online marketers and company owners are already employing new strategies to test the strength of campaigns.

Mumford, interviewed for this article, cited three key ways to analyze traffic data despite Google’s attempts to keep the information to itself:

1. Google Webmaster Tools

These tools allow website owners to see statistics on daily average traffic, prominent search queries, ranking position and other statistics.

These tools do not, however, always provide accurate results. Google webmaster tools reports, for example that DavidAndersonWealth.com ranks at position 81 in the US, but it has rested in position 33 to 38 for several weeks.

2. Site Search

This tool helps owners and markets understand keywords relevant to a customer buy cycle — you can find out what keywords customers click on (or ignore) when they’re on your site and adjust accordingly. Mumford says websites can synchronize site search with Google to help synch up their data with Google’s.

3. Site Surveys

Mumford says site surveys can be a very effective way to collect data provided your website has a decent amount of daily traffic. Such surveys can be more valuable than Google analytics, he says, because they do a better job of capturing user intent. Questions, ratings and comments on your site tell you more about your customers — and how to market to them — than the keywords they click on.

When you understand your customers, you can match keywords to their intent without Google’s help. If, for example, your site visitors click more frequently on words such as “lose weight now” than “get healthy,” you can build your content and marketing accordingly.

Bottom Line

Traffic analysis requires more nuance — and more guessing — and companies may make more missteps than they’re used to until their tracking skills become better refined.

Google is growing up and forcing website owners and online marketers to grow up, too.

About the author: David Anderson is an entrepreneur, business guru, mentor and author. Based on 30+ years of experience from the UK, USA Europe and Canada, David and his team have shared their “secret sauce” that has worked time and time again and helped “ordinary people achieve extraordinary things”. Visit David Anderson Wealth.

SEO has evolved a lot over the past few years and updates such as Google’s Penguin and Panda updates have improved the user experience for search engine users by improving the relevancy of search results and reducing spam sites from appearing.

If you want to improve your SEO efforts, here are my top 10 SEO tips to focus on for 2013:

1. Create Unique Content

We all know that content is king and creating fresh and unique content is what everyone including the search engines are looking for. So avoid duplicate content and focus on creating unique content that provides value to your users. If your content is good enough, not only will you naturally attract more readers, but the search engines will also credit you accordingly.

2. Use Different Anchor Text

To avoid search engines potentially flagging your website as spam, you should diversify your internal and external anchor text. Although using an exact match keyword for anchor text is probably less important than it was a few years ago, a website that uses the same anchor text over and over again, is likely to be flagged up by the search engines. So you should avoid exact matching keywords and instead use different variants of the keyword, company name or descriptive text for the anchor text in your links.

3. Vary Your Link Building Efforts

You should vary your link building strategies to naturally build up your backlinks. Instead of focusing on one tactic, you should instead use a number of different strategies to build up your links. For example, if you only focus on guest posts on the same sites, eventually these could be seen as low quality by the search engines. Instead, you should use a number of different link building tactics to spread the risk and gain different links from different sites.

4. Diversify Your Traffic Sources

You’ve probably heard of the saying, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Well the same is also true for your traffic sources – that is you should spread your eggs in many different baskets. There’s no doubt that Google is the top search engine to optimize for, but with the frequent algorithm updates the company releases, can your website survive if it was penalized or if Google suddenly went offline?

If you solely depend on one source for the majority of your traffic, you should seriously consider diversifying your traffic sources to protect yourself in the future and reduce your risk.

5. Implement Semantic Mark-up

Although this does not directly improve your search rankings, adding special semantic mark-up via rich snippets on your website can potentially improve the Click Through Rates (CTR) of your search result listing by highlighting certain information such as a photograph of yourself or testimonials from your customers with your search results.

By highlighting such information, you can gain more attention and attract more potential users to your site from the search results page, therefore improving the chance a user will click through from the search results to your website.

6. Get On Videos

You could say that many people prefer watching videos to reading and getting to the places where your users are, is important. So creating an interesting video can make it even easier to rank in the search results. This is especially true if your video has a lot of views and a lot of comments, potentially bringing you a lot of referral traffic to your website.

7. Optimize for Mobile Users

It has been said that mobile search is set to surpass desktop search by 2014 and with more people accessing information from smartphones or tablets, it’s becoming ever more important for us to optimize for mobile users.

Different ways to optimize for mobile users include creating a responsive design of your website or creating a separate website just for mobile users. Failing to optimize your website for mobile users means you’ll lose the potential of mobile traffic coming to your website.

8. Optimize for Locals

A recent study from YP.com found that “for consumers, local search is a near-daily ritual – 4 in 10 individuals use local search once a day, while two-thirds use local search at least 3-4 times per week.” With more and more users performing local searches on the move, failing to optimize for local search can be the difference between someone finding you or finding one of your local competitors.

9. Improve Your User’s Experience

SEO is all about your visitors and one aspect that is often forgotten is the user experience. That is, once a user lands on your website, does the experience end there? The answer is no. Factors such as site speed, bounce rates and average time spent on your website are all used by the search engines to determine a suitable search results ranking.

Put yourself in the seat of your users and ask yourself could the user experience be improved further on your website? Is the structure and information easy to navigate and find? By improving the user experience, users stay longer on your website and you can naturally increase traffic to your site.

10. Social Media Marketing

Having a social media marketing strategy can have a positive effect on your existing SEO strategies because it allows you be present on a number of different platforms to spread the word about your brand or website.

Unless you have a large budget, you should limit the number of social media networks you are on and instead focus on building relationships with your users and niche before moving onto the next platforms. Google has also mentioned that it does take into account social signals to determine search rankings, which makes having a presence on social media sites even more important.

About the author: Ving Chou is the founder of VC Marketing and provides more SEO tips in his Beginners Guide To SEO book.

2011 and 2012 have been incredibly important years in the world of search engine optimization and for search design trends in general. In an effort to make the web closer to something
semantic and highly responsive to the real needs of human readers, Google has performed some major overhauls to the way it ranks the websites it has indexed by its web crawlers.

These overhauls will be ongoing and will continue to develop further in 2013; creating a web popularity landscape that depends not just on classical SEO tactics but also numerous other factors involving social media, website design and friendliness to the latest browsing systems such as mobile web viewing.

Let’s go over some of these key trends that will almost certainly be really big in this new year.

1. Humanized Ranking Metrics

With Google’s repeated massively damaging blows to black hat SEO during all of 2011 and 2012, the days of effective link farming, content stuffing, keyword stuffing and other “nefarious” optimization tactics that don’t actually reflect site popularity are over. This trend will only continue and whatever black hat optimization tricks that are still working for some sites will only continue to deteriorate in their effectiveness.

Instead, Google is steadily working its way towards creating a more humanized ranking index that, in addition to reflecting other metrics which we’ll soon get to, also takes a lot of its value analysis from real time social media and human user metrics of actual popularity amongst readers.

The end result is expected to be a more “real time” search results profile for queries and an increasing amount of weight given to data collected from Twitter, Facebook, other social platforms and, of course, Google’s own array of social media tools. An important aspect of this will involve site owners connecting their content to each of these social platforms and also integrating themselves more with Google’s own network of content tracking. (despite the obvious bias in Google’s favor here)

2. Quality over Quantity

This almost certain 2013 trend is great news for a lot of content weary bloggers and site owners. Instead of giving heavy emphasis to massively content stuffed websites, Google and other search engines will continue to focus more on ensuring that their best ranked content is judged more by its quality, relevancy and freshness.

Updates like some of Panda’s iterations were a particularly good demonstration of this and played a part in giving precedence to sites whose content was most relevant and valuable for a given search, even if the sites themselves were not major content producers like some competitors might have been.

Based on this trend, site administrators should work towards really filling information needs with high quality posts without rushing to fill out as much new content as they can as quickly as possible.

3. Mobile Search

The mobile browsing landscape is only continuing to grow and soon it will completely overtake conventional web search. This means that adapting to the technical and practical details of this changing environment is a crucial step for SEO conscious site owners in 2013.

Speaking on a purely technical level, more emphasis has to be given to making websites more mobile friendly and designing them so that they are fully responsive not only to different PC browsers and screen sizes but also to thousands of different mobile platforms, from tablets to a whole array of smart phone types and operating systems.

Additionally, from other optimization standpoints, work to get your sites and their content more oriented towards mobile friendly content delivery. This could mean post design, text layout and presentation media such as video or audio

Another interesting feature of this emerging mobile search trend is the fact that a lot more of it takes place through a complex series of social network connections, bringing us to our next point.

4. Increasing Social Media Importance

We already partly covered the incredible importance of social media weight in our first major trend point, but it bears mentioning in more detail.

In 2013, you will absolutely need to develop your website’s social platform presence and integration as much as possible.

As more and more of the data about what’s trending on their platforms gets collected by social media sites, more of it will also become available for review by Google. This in turn will make such metrics more important in deciding search rank value. Ultimately Google is working to provide the most human relevant search experience possible to its users and the fundamentally human guided nature of social media popularity makes it a vital base of information for Google to achieve its goal.

Help this process along as much as possible by developing your popularity in the social media platforms and building up a base of dedicated fans that keep coming back to and repeatedly sharing what you have to offer further down the social chain. Not only will this eventually improve your essential human ranking value in the new search landscape, it will also achieve the vital site popularity building step of making you less dependent on search rank and SEO for the long run.

In essence, by developing a fan base at least partly through your social presence, you’ll be forcing the search engines to pay attention to you. Another way of looking at this is that building a deep human popularity amongst many fans and other influential websites will create a domain authority for your pages that no search engine can ignore.

Additionally, bear in mind practical technical steps that will improve your social media friendliness; things like creating multiple profiles across several popular media platforms, connecting them fully to your website through social media buttons and making it easy for people to log on through their Facebook or other social networking accounts.

5. Conversion Rate Optimization

However Google works, it has to also pay attention to reality on the digital ground. In terms of CRO, this has an enormous potential importance for 2013 because it means that a major factor in higher ranking may soon be how well sites get visitors to perform useful actions.

In essence, while many sites may have numerous visitors, the ones that optimize their pages for the best human engagement are those that actually get the readers not only to visit but also do things like buy products, click more links or opt in to a mailing list with their email addresses.

Since successfully doing all this is an obvious indicator that people are getting real personal value from a website, it’s very likely that Google will pay more attention to it in 2013.

For your own site, focus as much as possible on delivering high quality and getting maximal action or purchase conversion rates from whatever visitors you do have. Doing this is even more important than focusing on raw visitor numbers.

About the author: Matthew Ellis has written for the marketing and tech industries for many years as a freelance author. He also owns a small business that deals within those realms. When he’s not working, you can find him covering Acquirent’s sales jobs in Chicago.

Mobile search is growing at an incredible rate and brands looking to stand out in the ever-evolving landscape of the mobile Web need to start thinking about mobile SEO or search engine optimization.

Some brands are finding that up to 30 percent of all searches are coming from mobile devices and that number is set to increase as more and more people acquire Smartphones and continue to use the mobile Web to stay connected and find what they’re looking for.

You need to work hard to feature on the mobile radar

Mobile search is still a bit like the Wild West: unknown territory where pioneers are scoping out paths and trying out new ways to get things to work. One thing that is certain is your brand’s first and main concern must be the design and user experience associated with your mobile presence.

Search engines understand the mobile-friendly versions of your website is just that and not untrustworthy content that could negatively impact your brand’s search rankings. Make sure search engines’ mobile content crawlers are directed (via setting the user agent) to the same mobile version that users are sent to. Doing so avoids content and penalties, such as cloaking.

Understand the differences in how people search on mobile

A successful mobile SEO strategy will depend entirely on how well your brand can cater to the specific requirements and preferences that the mobile user dictates. While many mobile experiences are oriented toward just ‘working’ on a mobile platform, truly gearing the whole experience toward the user and not the device is key. Think about how, when, and where people are using their mobiles for search queries – if you have ever used a mobile device to find something online, the salient points will become quite clear.

Location, short search terms, automatic terms

The most important aspect to keep in mind for your mobile marketing and SEO is how the search terms differ for mobile search and desktop. The statistics shows there is an overwhelming emphasis placed on location specific searches on mobile which, again, makes perfect sense. Mobile users are using their mobiles to find out more about the locations in which they find themselves, especially when they need something specific. For instance, a person looking for a place to have lunch nearby is very likely to quickly look it up on her mobile as she continues her stroll or commute. Optimize for these kinds of searches by targeting these key terms in your brand’s website content.

Searches on mobile are also shorter because they’re happening on-the-go – with a noted increase in usage of predicative text that autofill search engine windows. Think about what your consumers will be searching for should they be wandering in your town and then cater to those kinds of searches.

Marry your social and you mobile

Mobile devices are increasingly being used as mediums through which people connect to their social networks on-the-go. To tap into the mobile/social scene, it is essential to integrate social functionality in your mobile website and applications. Things such as embedded Facebook ‘like’ buttons will help your brand gain more exposure while also creating a network of social links that will ultimately benefit your brand’s mobile SEO.

About the author: Article by Inge Van Eetveldt. Digital Fire, an e-mail marketing and digital media specialist with a head office in Cape Town. Digital Fire specializes in full service opt-in e-mail marketing, e-mail data rental, e-mail database management, social media consultancy and management as well as search engine optimization. We provide cutting-edge digital marketing and advertising solutions for our clients locally and abroad. Contact us today for digital marketing success.

There are many things that must be taken into consideration when performing local search engine optimization. Google actually takes different factors into consideration with local SEL, than they do with traditional search engine optimization. A few of the things taken into account you would not usually have to worry about when attempting to rank for general keywords include:

• Whether the website has a number of local business listings that point to it as further proof that it is a local company.
• The address and phone number listed on the website.
• Whether it is close to the central location keywords that they are attempting to rank for.
• Whether or not the company has any reviews listed for it.

Local Business Listings

One of the most important aspects of local search engine optimization is the presence of local business listings. In the eyes of Google, the fact that you are listed on a local business directory proves you are a local business – it is all part of the process of proving you deserve to be ranked for local keywords. Local business listings will allow you to not only promote your company, but also give potential customers multiple different paths that can be taken to find your business. Many local business listing services will also rank well in Google for terms that are related to your business, and can actually be an excellent way to drive traffic to your website in the long-term.

Address and Phone Number

Traditional search engine optimization professionals may not be aware local SEO also takes the address and phone number of the business into account. The address is checked against the “city center” location of the city-related keywords you are attempting to rank for in an effort to determine if your business is a viable option for individuals that live in that city. This is done to ensure you are not attempting to rank for keywords in cities that you cannot actually provide services to. Make sure the cities you are ranking for are close enough to your business locations to ensure the users get the best overall experience.

Reviews

You also need to attempt to put together reviews from previous clients across multiple websites. This is an indicator to Google your business has helped individuals in the past, and has a track record to prove it. You will find that positive reviews will also drive traffic to your website and allow you to put together a list of unsolicited testimonials for your website as well.

About the author: Article by Rosa Dawson. When conducting Local SEO, the use of a Local Business Listing Service will allow you to prove to Google that you are indeed a local business.

The mention of “SEO” is enough to make some small business owners cringe. They’ve been sold the snake oil and been taken to the cleaners by people charging them from a few hundred bucks a month to thousands of dollars. I always recommend that people dabble in doing some SEO themselves to get educated before they try hiring someone out. This helps you ask better questions and could potentially stop you from making a very bad mistake. With that in mind, here’s a quick primer on some SEO basics you can do on your own and some free tools that will help you get started.

On-Site SEO

There are two main components to SEO, on-site and off site. On-site is easy as you have control over it. You’ll want to make sure each of your key pages (i.e. home page, main category pages and product/service pages) are targeting 2-3 main key phrases unique to that page. Then you’ll want to make sure you’re using these keywords on your pages in the following areas.

1. The page title. Try to keep this under 70 characters for all of your additions to be seen by Google.

2. Body copy. Two or three instances of your keyword or key phrase will reinforce that it’s what your page is about.

3. Meta description. This doesn’t affect the search engines, but it usually shows up in the two lines of the Google search result, so adding your keywords in under 160 words while making a pitch as to why a user should click on your link here can help improve your traffic.

4. Alt tags. If you have pictures on your pages of your target keywords, make sure your alt tags reflect this to further reinforce to search crawlers that your page is full of content relating to your keywords. DO NOT add keywords to images that don’t match your images.

The tool that can help you here is Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider. The free version will crawl 500 pages of your site and return a tidy Excel sheet of all of your URLs and their meta information, as well as handy info on alt tags, broken links and header data. This will help you quickly identify what pages need the most TLC as you go through and audit your pages using the info above.

For more in depth information on this topic, try these posts:

* http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-onpage-seo-right-in-2012-and-beyond-whiteboard-friday

* http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2196496/How-to-Conduct-an-On-Page-SEO-Site-Audit

Off Site SEO – Link Building

This is the hardest part about SEO and the toughest to understand for most people. Good links to your site will make you rank higher. If you think about how many times you search and see Wikipedia show up, it’s because people constantly reference Wikipedia by linking to pages on the Wikipedia website. To Google, this means the content is relevant and authoritative. So to boost your own rankings you’ll want to get some links.

But where do you even start? That’s a question with a lot of answers, but for beginners the easiest thing to do is to see where your competitors are getting their links. If a site links to them, they should link to you, too, right?

If you want to check out a competitor’s links, one of the best free tools is Bing Webmaster Tools. You’ll need to first get your site verified (you can learn how to do this here) and then you’ll have a chance to get to the goodies in your dashboard. Just click into Diagnostics & Tools > Link Explorer and you’ll be able to get information from Bing’s database on links to any domain or page you’d like (with a limit of 1,000 links).

1. Filter by site – this allows you to limit the results to one specific site. So, for example, if one of your competitors has 200 links from competitorbuddy.com you could limit your search to see all of the links just from that site.

2. Anchor text – this allows you to filter the results by what the actual text of the links say. For example, if I wanted to rank highly for “table tennis” I’d want a lot of my links to my site to actually read as “table tennis” and then link to my page optimized for that term. If your competitor is ranking highly for a specific term, put it in here and see where they’re getting links with the right anchor text.

3. Additional query - this just lets you do a good ol’ fashioned Bing search within the sites linking to the competitor you’re looking at. So if your competitor sells indoor and outdoor products but you only sell indoor products, you may want to use some terms here to limit your results to pages that relate to your indoor products.

4. Scope - this lets you view links to individual pages (dictated by the main search window, here reading swimtownpools.com) or the entire site if you choose domain. If you want to see why a certain page is doing well, select “URL” – if you want the whole site choose “Domain.”

5. Source – this is pretty straightforward, the internal links are links within the site (so if your competitor’s about us page links to their contact us page they’ll show up here) while external only shows links from other sites and both, of course, returns both. For your purposes, external is likely the most valuable.

Armed with some of this data you can see where your competitors are getting links from and what kind of links. Are they writing guest blogs for industry websites? Are they sponsoring events to get links from those sites? Are they making sure all of their suppliers link to them? If the answers to any of these questions are yes, you can at least get started trying to mimic the strategies that are letting your competitors beat you. Once you get started you can keep tabs on your organic search traffic in Google Analytics and see if you’re moving in the right direction. Chances are, you will be if you stick with it.

While the tools are free, you will have to invest some time to use them. Whether you choose to continue doing SEO on your own or through an agency, you’ll at least have the ability to speak intelligently and ask some better questions if you tackle these tasks.

About the author: Adam Henige is an entrepreneur and managing partner at Netvantage Marketing, a Michigan SEO company with offices in East Lansing and Grand Rapids.