SEO trends for 2015

What’s the difference between business predictions and horoscopes?

Predictions don’t have to fall victim to hindsight bias. You can measure their accuracy by looking back on what actions came to fruition to prove or disprove your educated guesses. We wanted to see just how skilled we were at researching, analyzing, and making predictions, so we are taking a look back at our predictions for the SEO trends that we said were going to dominate 2014.

Here is a breakdown of the actual actions the major search engines took, as well as our top ideas for what will come in 2015.

1. Become one with your link profile

We called your link profile “one of the most precious things in the overall formula that determines your rankings” and suggested you take a dive deep into it, analyze it, stay clear of toxic links, and align to Google’s strict link building guidelines.

Just two weeks ago, Google quietly said it was rolling out a humongous “Penguin” punishment, the third of its kind, and that it had already been rolling out for over three weeks. In case you missed it, the Penguin penalties are the primary reason for websites to get kicked off the first pages in Google — something that’s extremely difficult to recover from.

Sadly, there are great companies out there that happened to hire unprofessional SEO providers, and they are the first to get hit by the massive fuzzy animal born in Matt Cutt’s mastermind. Then, there are also great websites that werehit by negative SEO, courtesy of their competitors.

The good news is that Penguin 3 also worked to re-rank websites, so if they were previously penalized, they had a chance to be spared any further punishment.

2. Use content to prove to Google you’re real

In our previous post, we showed you how to build a great content strategy for your website, with the assumption that Google helps real companies outrank regular sites. This follows an ongoing methodology of Google that’s been going ever since the Vince update and up to the latest Panda update.

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This is starting to be clearer and clearer as months go by — original, quality, and well-produced content is the new king of the internet, and you need to focus most of your efforts on it.

3. Be mobile and be fast… or don’t be

We talked about how a website that isn’t mobile compatible or loads slowly is going to be on Google’s evil side. To back us up on this one, Google released two revolutionary aspects of a mobile user experience.

The first one is a new Webmaster Tools feature that allows you to track the mobile UX of your site. Understanding that mobile is growing at an amazing pace, Google now lets you witness the visual errors that might have occurred for users browsing your site on the go — everything from small fonts to “touch” elements being too close.

Google didn’t stop there.

The search giant continued to emphasize the importance of mobile by adding a “beware” symbol to the mobile search result pages, alerting potential visitors that a result isn’t mobile-friendly.

It’s not just SEO related. In 2014, mobile has become so dominant that “mobile analytics” has turned into a generic phrase of its own, and companies are putting the same amount of effort into their app performance (traffic-wise) as their website. That led to the rise of platforms that are focusing solely on mobile traffic, and the likes of AppsFlyer, which has quickly grown to show insights into 2 billion app downloads a year.

Now, looking ahead to 2015

Now, seeing that our previous predictions came true in the form of major Google updates, it’s time to look into the near future and estimate what SEO is going to look like in 2015.

Here are three important trends to look forward to.

1. Adding social layers to a website

We all got used to Google Analytics telling us the location and number of people who visit and perform actions on our site. Then, platforms such as KISSmetrics came along to help us understand even more about who performed these actions.

This year, it seems that the next hit will be to dive one step deeper, putting a face on each and every one of our visitors and getting them to know each other.

An example of a platform that’s taking this to the actionable level is Spot.IM, launched by an ex-Soluto founder and aimed towards building a community around website traffic. The company’s plug-and-play widget turns websites into a social network, allowing users to communicate with each other and with the site publishers.

2. Visual content will replace plain text

We all saw the immense rise of visual content. The increased use of infographics and videos instead of plain text articles and mega-successful websites that are based on GIFs alone (can anyone say BuzzFeed?) are showing us firsthand just how vital visual is becoming.

It’s a known fact that Google indexes rich text with pleasure and gives it a certain priority in SERPs (search engine result pages), but there’s room to believe that plain text is actually going to softly be “penalized” as the search engine authorities already know users are sick of reading dry text.

3. Pre-secure yourself from negative SEO

There’s a certain irony that search engines are becoming more and more sophisticated, up to the level of a real-life artificial intelligence machine — and negative SEO is still putting millions of websites in danger.

Negative SEO, of course, stands for a competitor or any other person that is trying to de-rank you. It’s as simple as paying a foreign provider $5 to build thousands of black-hat, automated links to your site.

In 2015, businesses will need to work a lot harder to defend themselves against negative SEO, with an emphasis on securing their link profile (in other words, if a business owns such a natural and positive link profile, a few toxic ones won’t trigger any penalty), proving to Google that they’re a real brand.

It’s going to be a fun, fascinating, and fast-paced year. Let us know in the comments if you have any questions or further SEO predictions...\

Sources: http://venturebeat.com/2014/11/27/seo-trends-for-2015-whats-coming-next-plus-scoring-our-2014-predictions/

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Unique SEO content

A common worry for site owners is that of duplicate content. This worry can develop over time as your site gets bigger you might begin to forget how many pages are on your site and which elements are duplicated. Moreover, this worry seems to stem from the fact that SEO’s are unsure as to what exactly is duplicate content.
Duplicate content is a big issue which affects both SEO and content marketing. Unique content for SEO Search engines want to filter out duplicative content – this means they don’t want to show things that are the same. Search engines don’t want to show a set of results where all the rankings show the same article which contains the same content, photos etc. Search engines like Google know that users won’t like having a whole list of sites with the same content, which completely makes sense. However, it does leave us asking, how unique should I be with my content? Unique content for content marketing Firstly let’s explain the term unique content; this refers to the unique material on a page. When you break it down and exclude the likes of footers, ads and sidebars etc., this leaves a low percentage of page space which contains text. If you’re worried about having pages with light content, don’t worry about it too much as this is a common occurrence with many sites. What really matters is the unique value of the content which fills this space. Duplication applies to internal and external sources Internal – engines will try to ignore this if it’s occurring in small and subtle amounts happening here and there. There’s a reason for this, such as search engines accommodating for different versions of your pages such as mobile and print etc. External – you can include text from other sources but don’t overstep the mark here. By all means take a paragraph from Wikipedia or cite a blogger including some of their phrases or even use a YouTube video to supplement your content. It’s not duplicative as long as you’re adding unique value to this. This means you need to add your own insights into the piece, whether it be unique photo content or unique insider tips and comments. If you’re not adding value then it’s not unique enough for the search engines and why would it be if all you’ve done is a copy and paste. One more thing, a lot of SEO’s discuss a magical % of unique content that your pages should have. I’m sure I’ve even seen tools which assess your pages and give you a value of their uniqueness compared to this mythical perfect score. Well, it truly is a myth there’s no perfect percentage score that your pages should have. For Google this doesn’t exist so why should it exist for SEO’s? The algorithms are far more sophisticated than a specific percentage for unique content. Many different aspects are checked and scrutinised to deliver the best possible search results such as backlinks, comments, and social signals even domain authority can also play a role here. Finally, please remember that due to the Panda update duplicative content in one area of your site can harm your whole site. If you’re nervous about this you can robots.txt this content so robots don’t crawl it and you can make use of the rel canonical tag.

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Free SEO keyword analyzer tool!

This article is about a free website which has a
great text analysis tool, that is very useful for
anyone in the internet marketing game or who

optimizes their website for search engine rankings.
The sites address is www.textalyser.net this tool
really does the job when it comes to analyzing
either all the text on a website or just a certain
portion of your choice. Giving you all sorts of great
information about the keywords used in the site.
When you first enter the site you can either paste in
a certain portion of text into the designated area, or
you just type in the URL of the whole website you
would like to have analyzed. Then you can choose
as to what analysis options you would like to
perform. Such as the minimum characters per
word, whether you would like it to ignore numbers,
and a few more. After you chose your options then
you simply click analyze the text, thus returning you
a complete very detailed analysis.
At the very top of your analysis it shows some
basic text information like the total word count,
number of different words used, sentence count, a
readability index ranging from easy to hard. That
little function comes in handy, because you
definitely want the text of your page to be easy for
the viewer to read.
The next and perhaps most important feature,
shows you the occurrences and frequency at which
the top keywords for your page show up. It ranks
them from the number one word to whichever
number you would like it to stop at. That is set at
the options you chose before you analyzed the text.
This particular feature is very nice to SEO's, seeing
as that it lists the top words on a site and the
density/frequency of which they appear. So an
example of how this might help would be if you
were targeting to have a certain keyword density
for a particular keyword on your site. Thus enabling
you to figure out whether to add more or less of that
word to meet the density at which is required for
the search engines to list you for that keyword.
Not only does this tell you your top ranking
keywords it tell you the top word phrases, ranging
from 2 word to 5 word phrases. It gives the count of
how many times that phrase was used and also
shows the frequency compared to the rest of the
text on the page.
Anyone who is in the internet marketing field
especially marketers who optimize their websites
for search engine traffic can make great use of this
free tool. I personally find great use in this tool for
the process of my keyword research, which is
essential for any search engine optimization
campaign.

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