SEO Trendz 2013

SEO Trendz 2013

SEO Trendz 2013

The world of SEO is an ever changing one, keeping on trend is often pretty hard - but vitally important. Below are some facts and figures that show why it is so important to keep up to date:
• Around 80% of those actively searching the internet use natural listings rather than paid or sponsored ones
• 450 million internet users worldwide perform around 13 billion searches each month
• Search engines account for 90% of new visitors to a website
• 43% of people who bought from an online retail site arrived via search engines
• 44% of internet users find new websites through search engines.
This article aims to give some predictions of the SEO trends for 2013, so it would be appropriate to tell you a few of the highlights from last year's SEO trends:
• Mobile search has increased significantly: due undoubtedly to the ease and convenience of searching on your mobile, but also the improvement and popularity of smartphones and tablets. Everyone I know has a smartphone (except, surprisingly my wife) and everywhere you look people are using them.
• Voice search emerged as a new search method: Suri and Google Voice have both gained popularity during 2012. I've used Suri, but I must admit I still have trouble getting it to understand my accent (I'm frightfully northern don't you know).
So, what are my predictions for 2013?
• Press releases will become as important as blogging: press releases are already becoming very important as they can easily convert targeted traffic and appeal to a wide-variety of media channels. Both of these factors help to bring the company using them more credibility.
• Social Media will still influence search engine performance, however two of the social media giants; Facebook and Twitter are both reducing the amount of data given to third parties. Rumors are that Facebook will be releasing their own search engine soon - watch this space.
• Google+ will play a bigger and bigger role in SEO. There have been a few teething problems, but these have been sorted and it is fast becoming big competition for the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Initiatives such as Author Rank mean that this channel will become even more important to search engine ranking, especially Google (unsurprisingly).
• Organic search marketing will become more prominent, due to the majority of sales coming from organic search results, which leads on to the next prediction...
• Humanized ranking will be relied on more. Google has said that they are going to start using social media for human relevancy and give people more “real time” search results. Therefore blogs, press releases, regularly updated social media and fresh, relevant content is going to become even more important.
• Title tags and headings will stay as important as ever, playing an even bigger role in the way that your post and website will be ranked in search engines. Google wants to see more focused content or keyword based content within the title tags and headings.
• Blogs and articles will have to get longer - expect to read (or indeed, write) blog posts that are at least 600 words long.
I, for one, am excited about search in 2013. It will be great to get back to generating and disseminating high quality content - trends that will be music to the ears of marketers, PR professionals and journalists out there.