Today we're talking about SEO trends 2013 edition. Search engine optimization can be a weird industry, because what you did last year may not work for your marketing this year. Today we're going to dive in to the changes in the industry -- the 2013 seo trends. We stay very up to date on the top SEO publications, and have been closely watching these trends change over the last five years with fascination. Google has been evolving its algorithm to prevent spammers from gaming the system, and we're here to tell you what the changes are -- what should you be doing to up your rankings in 2013?
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to our video on the 2013 SEO trends. I'm Chad Hill and I also have Adam Stetzer here.
Good afternoon, Chad. Today we're talking about SEO trends 2013 edition. This is a weird industry, search engine optimization, because what you did last year really may not work for your marketing as well this year. So we want to dive in today to what has been changing. We stay pretty current on the top SEO publications. We've been watching these trends develop with fascination for the last five years or so. Watching as Google has been evolving its algorithm as the spammers have been out there trying to game the system.
And we always want to advise our viewers to do high quality marketing that builds a web presence to last for the long term. So let's get into that. SEO trends 2013. What do we see in what's hot today, Chad?
Yeah, definitely. I think the first thing we're seeing is that 2013 seo trends are getting harder to track.. This started in the end of almost a year and a half ago, with Google starting to block keyword referral data. So we started seeing "not provided" showing up in Analytics. And that's grown through last year and continues to grow.
And then the second thing that we see even more recently is there's been a crackdown on the people and ways you can gather ranking data. And so a lot of the people in the market that were providing ranking information are no longer doing that or are having to go to alternative sources. So now more than ever, it's hard to show where people rank, and what traffic you're getting from certain keywords.
And this is an obvious move by Google in 2013 seo trends, because they know that if they can take some of this data away, and you can't feel as immediately when you change something it increases your ranking, it helps them defend against people who are really gaming them. And a lot of those people, unfortunately, have poor intentions.
Our affiliate marketers are scaring people, perhaps. And they're really trying to fend those folks off. So we're going to talk about some strategies, though, that make you less reliant on looking at those metrics day to day. And so what are some of those things we see as emerging trends? Well, what's old is new, and in 2013 seo trends just like in years before, content is king. And actually, also think that long tail is back. So what we're seeing is that writing and creating great content that include longer tail keywords is definitely a way to get referrals from the search engines. And one of the nice things about that is it because you're creating this content ideally on your website but also on other places as well, for earning links back. But one of the things that if you are creating it on your website, you can start to see referrals, and people leaning on those pages from the search engines, which gives you the feedback to know that the work you're putting is actually turning into visits and ranking.
And this really is one of the biggest 2013 SEO trends, because everyone's talked about content is king, long tail is useful, for a long time but I release feel like something has changed in the algorithm where establishing authority on some of these long tail terms really helps your head term move up in ways that it didn't before. I just think it's the natural evolution of Google getting smarter at figuring out who really has excellent content. Content that people like, that has good time on site, that's represented in social signals and other footprints they have.
So going after that long tail may have been seen in previous years as not having a strong return on investment. Ad most will probably focus more on their head term. But I think in 2013 seo trends, we're saying, head back in those long tail words.
Exactly. And then, I think one of the other big seo trends 2013 is that link building is becoming-- or is-- a dirty word. And so you really need to think more about earning links, which really takes you directly into content marketing. And when you talk about content marketing, you really need to think about smarter ways to find opportunities to earn those links. To find places to syndicate your content and your ideas and earn links back to your website.
So some of the things that we've been talking a lot about and seeing that are 2013 seo trends and have been successful are things like videos-- video blogging, and creating videos. infographics-- and then some of the older ones that are still working are creating compelling how to information articles that you're able to find the places that are willing to posts that content and you earn a link back to your website.
And it really is funny. Link building is becoming a dirty word. But some very creative ideas are out there for doing high quality content marketing that's really useful for the end user. We talked about news jacking. We wrote about it on Search Engine Watch, recently. A very clever way to get a branded mention in a back link into a trending story-- as Chad, mentioned, there's other tactics, such as infographics.
But I think the big point-- and we've been talking about this quite a bit-- you need to think about your SEO as not being separate from your overall marketing. Whereas in the past, people thought of SEO-- OK, I got my on-site seo nailed. Now I'm going to move to my off-site. That's really link building.
That thinking is going out. And the people who are very successful in achieving very difficult rankings are integrating their SEO strategy into every aspect of their marketing execution. Because they've realized when they do that, the quality of their SEO is better. Because it's not a standalone product. It's not me acquiring links. It's me doing excellent marketing which also has a secondary benefit of helping me in the search engine.