gustaf hansel: Top SEO Trends in 2013 for Small Business Owners

SEO Trends for 2013 2013 is the year of the snake which symbolizes that all things are possible.

Even if you?re not fond of Chinese Zodiac Calendars, I wanted to share that with 2013, we can expect a lot of things to happen in the world of Search Engine Optimization

Before I share the top SEO predictions and trends for 2013, let?s have a recap of what happened in the previous years, 2011 and 2012.

The SEO world had major overhauls.

Panda was first released in 2011, targeting hundreds of low-quality websites.

Penguin targeted spammy link building techniques and link networks during summer of 2012.

If you relied mostly on these spammy link building methods and link networks, you will most likely be hit with the Penguin Update.

If you?re a business owner, it?s important to have Google Analytics installed and mark the date and week your traffic and rankings dropped.

These drops in dates will give you clues whether you have been penalized by the Panda or Penguin updates.

Don?t know where to start? No problem, we can help you get your site out of the Panda and Penguin penalties.

1. ?Google Authorship ? If you are a business owner and have a website, it?s highly recommended that you claim your content and get a Personal Google+ profile that links to your site.

Google has been pushing Google+ across all their products and this could mean a bigger shift to what the search engine giant wants to do in the future.

Ever noticed the (not provided) results in your analytics? Most of those visits are coming from people who are logged in one of Google?s products.

I was thinking of saying social signals, but until Facebook gives full access to their data for the search engines to crawl, we might not be seeing a lot of SEO benefits from facebook shares.

2. Build a Twitter Profile ? If you have daily deals, updates, events and new products and services for your business, then you need to have a twitter account.

Twitter profiles and links can give a significant boost to your SEO campaigns if you have built an authoritative Twitter profile.

3. Repurpose your Content in Different Forms of Media ? You can now transform your articles into PDF files and submit them to doc sharing sites like slideshare.com and scribd.com

Turn your viral posts and top tips into Youtube videos. The most popular Youtube videos are either the funniest, or the most helpful.

Start a Podcast or create an Ebook and promote it as a free download in exchange of their emails or contact details.

4. Use WordPress ? Self hosted wordpress allows you to do a lot of things to your website that a standard html or php program won?t.

Mobile websites
Responsive Design
E-Commerce Sites
Search Engine Optimized Websites
and more?

The top websites and small businesses use wordpress. It?s free and highly customizable.

5. Diversify Links? ? Unfortunately a link is still a link. Even after the Panda and Penguin updates, no one will argue that a backlink is what helps the search engines rank a website for a particular term.

But it?s more important now than ever, not to rely on only one or two types of links. If people asked us how we build links and acquire them, this is what we do.

In order of top priority, we gather links from:

1. Most powerful links / link neighborhood of your competitors. ? Your top 10 competitors will have diverse links. We are experts in discovering which links would beneficial to your site and which links aren?t.

2. Golden Linking opportunities that are not spammy and that are hard to get, but will also be hard for your competitors to acquire.

These require a lot of work, and it is part of our Search Engine Optimization process.

3. Foundation links - These are links from directories, web 2.0 sites, blog comments, guest posts and more. These creates the initial layer of links that supports your website?s link profile.

Are These Predictions Enough? What Do You Think?

In my opinion, 2013 is like SEO when it first started. No one knows about it, and people kept wondering how to rank their websites.

Today, the search engines has filters and tons of penalties that can drop your site?s rankings and traffic overnight. This could mean an overnight loss of business and could definitely cripple or shutdown your business.

But fortunately a lot of developments happened in SEO. The right tools are now available at our disposal to help us determine what works and what doesn?t. We don?t blindly guess what would work for your website and small business.

We have a proven track record of improving our client?s SEO and rankings in the past few years by as much as 6742% in a span of just a few years.