6 Things to Consider for your 2013 SEO Plan

The Digital Essentials, Part 3

Developing a robust digital strategy is both a challenge and an opportunity. Part 3 of the Digital Essentials guide series explores five of the essential technology-driven experiences customers expect, which you may be missing or not fully utilizing.

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After all the Google algorithm updates we saw in 2012, it is important to reflect on past strategies and adjust your 2013 SEO plan. Here are six things to consider for this year’s strategy.

Don’t think your website will rank for a large amount of keywords with only a few valuable pages.
Stuffing keywords on title tags, Meta description tags, and other on-page SEO factors is not enough and it’s dangerous. Having targeted quality content, helps search engines understand how certain keywords relate to each page on your site. If a specific keyword is very important to your business AND you have enough good and original information for the copy then it should definitely have its own page.
Do not expect to maintain rankings with a static site.
Website owners get disappointed when rankings are falling and they stop seeing the benefit of investing in SEO. But if you don’t invest time in writing thought leadership materials or engage with social followers, then keeping those rankings will be very challenging.
You can’t rely on backlink software and black hat practices anymore.
In the past, businesses would invest in black hat link building to improve rankings, but as search engines became smarter, this practice lost its effectiveness. Google wants businesses to focus on the original website objective: human visitors. Investing time on thought leadership materials, press releases, real articles, social media, etc. is now the way to go.
Don’t take shortcuts.
Invest the time to write good quality content. If you provide valuable information, humans and search engines will find it and share it. Empower your employees to write for your blog, take pictures, and record videos to share on your website and social media channels.
Customers need to be your #1 objective.
When you offer good quality content to your customers, they appreciate it and share it, creating natural backlinks that improve the authority of your site. As site authority increases, your search engine rankings improve. If you keep your customers as the #1 objective, it will inevitably create a domino effect, which will improve site performance.
SEO is not a one person task or a one-time activity.
An SEO specialist can help a company understand SEO basics, can lay the foundation for an optimized site, and can continuously provide ideas and recommendations to improve site performance, but SEO is not a one person task or a one-time activity, it is a mentality that leverages every part of a content strategy.