fabian hedgehop: SEO Practices in 2013: Location, Links and Luck ? Part 1

seo This post is brought to you by our Search Marketing Channel sponsor Blurbpoint.

Google?s search engineer Matt Cutts said that Google?s algorithms change once per day at the least. In one year, over 500 algorithm changes take place. Instead of focusing SEO strategy to fight against Panda, Penguin and other animal-friendly Google changes, strategies need to focus beyond typical SEO tactics. Here are a few ideas for you.

Innovative Guest Posts

Guest blogging is the best SEO that a site owner can implement for a site and it?s been a major topic on SEOmoz?s whiteboard. However, you have to regulate guest bloggers and pay attention to the content as unrelated and spam content impacts rank negatively. Article directories used to make sense for SEO strategies but link building turned this into a wasteland, over-infusing with keyword content instead of articles that actually held value.

There are tons of blogs out there still swamped by unsavory guest articles that don?t have the right headlines, content and keywords. They simply aren?t about anything, which means that the links are also irrelevant and leads to a higher bounce rate. Visitors can spot a lousy article with spam content within seconds of viewing a page. For those who have never used guest posts, check out a beginner?s guide to understand the difference between good and bad guest posts.

Author Rank

This year, author rank is essential to getting an overall better rank in Google. Author rank is a new way for Google to rank the quality of particular authors. As relevancy to users becomes important in search evaluation, Google?s algorithms place a larger emphasis on author rank.

Wondering how to build author rank??

One of the most useful ways to gain ranking and more exposure is authorship markup. You can set your posts to the public in ?Contributor To? under the ?About? section of your Google+ profile and add link to your site. The other most important aspect is Google+ sharing. The more often you share your content on Google+, the more you increase the popularity of the content and its rank. Then comes Google+ connection, as Google only wishes to improve the search engine technology and relevancy of its results, it is indeed important to make sure that the people you have in your circle are also adding you or not. Last but not least is Google+ Activity. Since promoting your own content has always been the topmost priority for anybody, sharing the content of others can also improve the connections and consider you as an active user.

Co-Citation

Referencing another piece of work is a great way to build content, but you have to understand the rules of co-citation. Search engine optimization and co-citation work together to improve the relationships between words in an online article. For example, if Mark?s Leather shop sells ?excellence running shoes,? search engines won?t initially recognize that ?Mark?s Leather shop? and ?excellence running shoes? go together unless the relationship is found on multiple sites. This is the basic idea of co-citation.

As Rand proposed in his blog post, using co-citation to help rank results is speculation. Rand pointed out three sites that received rank for terms with no mention of those same terms in the respective title tags. However, type in a random search term in Google and you still find that sites in the top results have optimized their title tags. As with other things in SEO, there are many theories and only a few defined answers since Google keeps its algorithms extremely secret.

Google takes steps each year to make it more difficult to manipulate its search algorithm in order to facilitate original and interesting content. For that reason, Rand?s speculation has a lot of merit. For now, a link profile with a natural amount of keyword rich anchor text and a site with optimized title tags still works for today?s SEO strategy. Citation should definitely be considered in the future for SEO strategists.

Press Releases

Press release has always been the most useful resource to make the public and the media aware of the business?s products and services. Its popular networks like PRWeb or Business Wire have always helped many websites to generate great amount of authoritative back-links. Distributing a press release which is inserted with a related keyword choice in the prominent areas along with a newsworthy content always leads your company name to recognize as a credible brand. Don?t forget to include anchor-text specific links that highlight different terms. Besides that, a home page or sub page link in order to drive traffic to the main site or an internal page.

An online paid press release has a distribution list of news websites and freelance journalists. The job of this service is to email your press release to different newsy spots across the Internet. Whether to publish the content or not is up to the editors of those websites. The challenge then is to phrase your news release in a way that its relevant, newsworthy and timely so that journalists want to publish it or write about it in some way.

Matt Cutts has also advised that links from press releases are no longer contributing to page rank. However, SEO Consult?s Blog proved differently with a recent test, which showed that press release links still work for rank.

Social Media and Signals

Two years ago, Matt Cutts also tried to deny that social signals had any effect on search rankings. However, this changed later that same year when Matt Cutts said that social media was starting to work due to the buzz and subsequent signals created by sites that integrated with social media. This also factored into site authority factor. Oddly enough, a few months later, Google+ was released.

The Penguin update and other tweaks changed the way that search engines interpret aggressive optimization. SEO strategies can no longer focus on bulk links. Quality links trump quantity, but search engines also have a governing factor that restrains how quickly a site can increase their rank. However, like many things, this is still under debate.

As social signals grow in their effects on search rankings for both Google and Bing, the ability to create amazing content and promote on social media requires more finesse and subtlety. Those techniques are prized among Internet marketers. The ability to use social media effectively will become more important this year, taking focus away from link-building.

Matt Cutts released this webmaster video that confirms social signals do aid in the role of organic SEO.

The information and opinions in this post are not necessarily those of Marketing Pilgrim.

About the Author:

Sanket Patel is the Founder of Blurbpoint.com, a leading SEO Company since 2006. Blurbpoint.com specializes in Advance Guest Blogging Services, SEO Services, Link Building, Online Reputation Management, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing and much more.