2012 has been a strange old year for anyone working in the SEO industry. We’ve seen more changes in a year than the previous five put together. For anyone operating a white hat SEO operation which believes in producing great sites with great content, the changes have been nothing but positive. For those people out there looking to hoodwink the search engines, the last few months have probably been pretty challenging! The question is of course, what sort of SEO company do you employ, and how have the changes affected your site? Whatever the answer, the action necessary in either situation is to make sure that you move ahead with an SEO company that is going to take you in the right direction, in the right way. To give you an idea of what they should be doing for you, here’s a few things you should and shouldn’t be doing next year when it comes to SEO.
No more keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing should have gone out with the Ark, but alas, it lives on. Thankfully, it is dying out, because the updates of last year have hit poor content hard. That’s why next year calls for good content and lots of it. These days, Google is all about finding fresh content that it believes to be valuable information for those passing through. If it doesn’t help someone, Google doesn’t want to know. How do you go about this? Start a blog, talk about your work, and generally communicate with the people who you want to visit your site.
Go easy on the tags
It used to be that web masters spent more time optimizing their Meta tags than they did eating hot dinners, but again, times have changed. This sort of behavior will get you absolutely nowhere these days. Far better to restrict yourself to your main keyword in the header, and spend your valuable time more wisely.
Social Media
To be truthful, social media has been pretty important for some time, but its importance only keeps growing, so if you are not putting a good deal of your resources into this area of your business at the moment, you need to have a rethink. Again, it is about communication, ad finding a voice. Connect with people who want to hear from you, and keep them updated. Done well, it really is that simple.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
Well not quite. We’re not going to put a figure on it, but there are a damn site more important than they used to be. There was a time when Google’s spiders carefully crawled around the edges of a picture perhaps dipping a toe into a title tag here, an alt tag there, but those days are gone. With Google Picture search ranking pages independently and with Google video search the next thing coning into view, you could do worse than to refocus your attention on the part pictures play on your site. We’re now seeing sites that are almost entirely made up of pictures ranking extremely highly, so it’s worth bearing in mind.
NO more DIY!
OK so this heading doesn’t apply to everyone. While we are well aware that there are people out there who are great writers and have a fantastic knowledge of SEO, we are also aware that there aren’t that many of them! If you want good content, hire someone in. If you want your page to run like a dream, get in touch with a local SEO company. These people are the experts, and they can implement all of the changes necessary to make 2013 a great year for you and your website. It’s one thing to know what to change; it’s entirely another being able to make those changes.
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