Top 5 SEO Projections for 2013

2012 is coming to an end and Google has been very active with the latest Panda and Penguin updates during this year. Indeed, search engine optimization is a moving target of every webmaster competing for traffic! In this article, we will discuss five projections by SEO experts around the globe.

Review of the Recent Google Updates

Panda and Penguin updates this year took the online world by storm. Google had made the effect of penalizing website with no added value to readers. Duplicated and weak content were abolished and eradicated. Using analytics and quality metrics, Google was able to also get rid of spam blogs with overly stuffed keywords. The focus has to be articles with cornerstone content. On the rise are content (either in the form of video, text or image) thriving with uniqueness.

So if you’re a blogger, promoter of any online content or anything of this sort, you should abide by this mandate.

What might Google come up with in 2013? Let’s find out!

Top 5 SEO Projections

1. Google Author Rank markup will be the basis of ranking.

Google+ has launched the rel=”author” markup which enables you as an author to link up all the articles you published. When this snippet of code is added to your blog and your content, your headshot in your Google+ profile will appear beside the search results. Empowering author rank, this thus makes your authority more known to the public.

Jon Payne, President and Founder of Ephricon Web Marketing, explains further that Google begins to look at trusted links coming from the same author source. The forecast is that instead of Page Rank, Author Rank will matter more to search engines in the last two quarters of 2013. So as early as now, you must claim authorship of all your content in the web with this Google author rank markup.

2. Guest posting will be devalued by Google.

Guest posting works by publishing posts in other blogs and capturing audience in the same niche to get them connected to your own. In essence, this allows you to expand your followers and fan base. But earlier this year, Penguin and Panda came to effect. They changed the original paradigm by configuring the algorithmic weights of guest posts.

There are various spam guest posts created on the web. Hence, Google is now not so much in favor of guest posting, as it sees these “post exchanges” only as a manipulator or search engine results. On the other hand, if you have been solely submitting posts with good quality, then you should not be affected negatively by any Google updates for the years to come.

Be careful linking guest posts with bad neighborhood. If your post involves duplicate content and cloaked content such as stuffed and unrelated keywords, you’ll also be in deep trouble.

3. Social signals will highly affect the SERPs.

As there is now so much traffic booming in social media, Google may have to get good use of these channels to position content in search engine. Closer to home is its very own: Google+. The Google Plus system can potentially bring much weight in determining whether or not the page or content has been helpful to readers. Posts with more social sharing points (+1’s) will be given a greater deal in SEO.

However, there are also rampant manipulations of shares. Case in point is Facebook likes and recommendations. Another is Twitter likes and favorites. Services are available in the Internet wherein these social shares can be bought with money to gain credits in turn. Google has to figure out a way to track these incidents for social signals to reign as appropriately.

4. Highly increasing personalized search results will be recognized.

Google works to provide relevant search results to users. What better way to cater this service than producing personalized search results? Google identifies the user’s location and search engine activities. For instance, location-based search results from Google will prioritize pages from your country to top in the results page. You will see a different set of posts coming out of the first page when you change your location setting in Google.

Problem is that optimizing your meta tags and description with keywords relevant to your business may do good only locally. (By default, Google learns your location by your IP address.) If you are targeting clients who belong to other locations in the world, businesses in these countries might just defeat your rank in SEO quite easily.

5. Technical parameters such as page titles and descriptions will have greater bearing in SEO.

CEO of CompeteLeap, Ryan Draving, says that spinning articles with poor grammar will not be counted by Google as a hit. Obtusely written titles and descriptions of pages and posts will also be useless. Google hunts those websites solely created to advertise brands without engagement with users. Draving adds that Google expects to see your legitimate brand or company name attached in the majority of your inbound blog links.

Conclusion

Many of these predictions are based on the natural progressions of Google updates as seen in the recent months. Keeping up with Google changes in SEO algorithms is challenging. But now that you’re more guided, you can think ahead and practice your SEO with a futuristic mindset. Analyze them and carry on with the best practices. Good luck!