Top 2013 SEO Trends

Top 2013 SEO Trends
1. Authorship
2. Links - Start spending less time worrying about links and more time creating a great user experience on the website.
3. Keyword research - Shift your focus away from keywords per se and more to the quality of landing pages.
4. Social - Don’t cheat by trying to increase your Facebook Likes. Search engines will prioritize natural relationship building.
5. Mobile - Look at the pages with the most engagement and conversion. Those are the pages to carry over to a mobile website.

The Increasing Value of Mobile Optimization

More than half of U.S. consumers now have a smart phone, and decreasing prices and broader availability mean penetration will grow rapidly in 2013 and beyond. Already, 60% of consumers consult their smart phone on their way to, or inside of, a brick-and-mortar store, according to research firm Deloitte Digital. These numbers leave little doubt that the role of mobile devices in search and purchase decisions will only increase.

The question that remains is how quickly digital marketers will follow through and develop mobile-specific content and formats.

Quality Trumps Quantity as Content Re-emerges as King

Quality Trumps Quantity as Content Re-emerges as King. SERP ranking signals are increasingly moving from being “quantity” based, i.e., keyword rankings and number of links, toward
being “quality” based. Quality is being determined by a number of factors, including author trust (as evidenced by the expansion of Google’s Rel=Author/AuthorRank program in 2012), as well as content authority, freshness, relevance, and depth.

"Social endorsements are becoming a key influence as search engines look for site content that is important to web visitors as evidenced by likes, tweets, and shares."

Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors

Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors. Turning unstructured data such as social network reviews and conversations into structured data that search engines can more easily crawl has become crucial to SEO performance.

Great infographic from the folks over at SearchEngineLand entitled The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors.

Google’s Dominance Challenges SEOs to Rethink Metrics, Data Sources

Trend #2: Google’s Dominance Challenges SEOs to Rethink Metrics, Data Sources. Google continues to innovate at unprecedented speed, and rapid changes to its search engine results page (SERP)
algorithms have created challenges for search marketers and agencies alike. An overwhelming majority of search marketers – 87% – say Google’s algorithm changes over the past year to 18 months are “significant” or “highly significant,” according  to SEMPO (see Table 6).

SEO Tools Market Trends

SEO Tools Market Trends. The enterprise SEO tools market is being driven by a number of important trends, including: 

1. Enterprise SEO solidifies its role in digital marketing strategies.
2. Google’s dominance challenges SEOs to rethink key metrics and data sources. 
3. Quality trumps quantity as content re-emerges as king. 
4. The increasing value of mobile optimization.

The following sections discuss each of these trends in more depth.

Speculation, Acquisitions Support Market Development

Investment capital and acquisitions have helped the market matu re quickly. Vendors are using organic development and bolt-on acquisitions to solidify core functionality and expand their tools’ scope (see Table 3). In October 2012, for example,
Conductor raised $20 million in Series C funding to fuel international expansion, staff growth, and product development.
Earlier, in March 2012, BrightEdge attracted $12.6 million in Series C funding, while SyCara raised $2.1 million.