It’s really common with SEO and especially when we focus too much on getting backlinks. We all know that backlinks are extremely important, no doubt, and we don’t think the value of backlinks for SEO in 2012 is going to be disappeared. Even if your site has a ton of backlinks you might be missing many things. Now it’s not just links that counts, it has become wider than before. You should think on On-Page, Social Presence, Content and User Signals to your site which is one of the ranking factors. If you only focus on backlinks or you only focus any one factor it’s not going to help you out. Instead of concentrating on just one of these above factors at 100% if you can concentrate 50% with all, you’ll get good results. It’s critically important as your SEO strategy in 2012.
In 2011 Google made 13,311 evaluations and 516 changes to the algorithm. So we can say that Google is changing the algorithm almost every day or sometimes twice in a day! So rather than chasing the algorithm, think about where the algorithm focuses. Chasing the algorithm will give you only a short term success as the engineers will fill up the loophole in a short time. On the other hand if you can think or imagine where Google is heading, you might get great success. Google’s main goal is to present quality and useful sites in SERPs. What if your site is a crap one! Google will never rank it. So think about creating unique value on your site. You can do this in a numerous ways. You can add user generated content. You can add some description about your own products. You can publish your own editorial reviews about your services or products. You can put some videos on your site which describe your products or services or you may have Q&A about your products/services. If you have thousands of products, you may do it with a few hundred if it’s not possible with all of them. The main thing is adding something unique what others don’t have.
Things to consider in 2012:
1) Clickthrough Rate : Think about how you can optimize your site Title and Snippet to increase click through rate. A keyword stuffed site title or a snippet will lead to less clickthrough rate.
2) Bounce Rate: If a visitor is leaving your site in just one or two seconds and going back to Google to search with other keywords and it continues with 100s of them, it might lead Google to think that the site has less value or just a crappy one. Your site design, content, usefulness of the content to visitors, user experience can reduce the bounce rate.
3) Site Speed: If your site is getting more time to be loaded in the browser, this is not good. Over 99% visitors will shut it down before it appears in their browsers. So make a clean, fast loading site design that stands out and really be attractive as well. Site-speed is one of the factors in Google’s algorithm. Just think who’s going to sit and wait in 2012 for your site to get loaded? You have to get your message out very fast.
4) Clean code: Google is getting better at crawling and indexing web pages. But in our opinion you need to keep your code very simple. Simple is the best! If you use too many Java scripts or Ajax, that can really cause crawl-ability issues with your site. You may follow Google’s Quality Guidelines to make your code easily crawl able. Make proper use of h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6 tags.
5) Site Navigation: Try to minimize your navigation menu. Do not put links to all the pages on your site. Try making categories and do not put site-wide links to go back. People used to use browser’s back button to go back to the main-page. They usually don’t click on your site navigation’s button to go back to the page where they were. Every page should not link to every other page on your site. This can frustrate users.
6) Content on your site: You need to come up with fresh content all the time on your site cause that can attract links. Google gives more credit to links that are natural and not artificial. Spend more money on writers and designers than spending on getting backlinks. If your site has old content or say keyword stuffed content or less valuable content just delete it and come up with fresh useful content that can satisfy a user when he/she clicks in SERPs and comes to your site. For example: Suppose you have a hotel site, you can publish information about nearby places to visit, its history and how to reach there, how much will it cost for a person to reach to such places, what they can do there, where and what to eat, local food and blah blah. This can really make a huge impact on visitors and this creates authority as well.
7) Qualities of a good trustworthy website.
Clean, modern and beautiful design.
Grammatically correct content.
Detailed information about the authors and publishers of the content.
High quality graphics and images.
Links to other trustworthy sources like Wikipedia.
Social bookmarking buttons like Tweets and Google +1.
Short memorable domain.
Useful content.
Professional logo with a tag line.
A place where users can comment on.
Contact information with Phone, Fax, Email and Googlemap.
A Blog with videos, images.
Things to follow in 2012.
Publish a blog and establish yourself as an authority.
Create some videos and publish them on Youtube or Vimeo.
Write new blog posts and publish.
Post updates and blog posts links on Twitter and Digg.
Publish reviews of your products and services.
Do some blog commenting and try to be in the discussion.
Create profiles on social networking sites and be active there.
Participate in forums related to your niche.
Answer questions asked on Q&A sites.
Publish content that’s useful for others.
Create some tutorial videos and how-tos if possible and publish.
Make a page on your site for FAQs.
Provide Online Support, Live Chat facility or a toll free number.
Make some good articles and publish them on Guest Posting Sites.
Be active on Twitter and Digg and Google+1.
Spend more time on writing quality content.
So, there you have it…
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