Want the SEO Magic Bullet?
The SEO magic bullet is this: fresh, original, relevant, high-quality content written primarily for people and not search engines. If you have that on your website, you have nothing to worry about. No Google algorithm changes will ever have a negative impact on your search engine ranking.
The Updates That Changed SEO Forever
Panda and Penguin, the two major algorithm updates that Google introduced as few years back, put an end to black hat SEO techniques that exploited backlinks, over-optimisation, and keyword stuffing to improve the ranking of websites. Quality has beaten quantity, and websites that featured a large quantity of poor quality links, keyword-stuffed articles, or duplicate content were heavily penalised.
If you are an ethical online marketers these algorithm updates were probably good news for you. They probably put a check on competitors that abused black hat SEO to rank higher than you in search results without deserving it, and boosted your site’s ranking. If, on the other hand, you’ve been affected by the updates, they must have sounded the alarm bells, making you understand that the tactics you were using were not sustainable.
New Beginnings
2014 is a year of new beginnings as far as SEO is concerned. It’s the year when sites that don’t have top quality content will strive to create it, or else be relegated to the last pages of the search results, lose traffic and above all, reputation. These days web users have little patience or tolerance for sites that abuse SEO. Considering the huge number of websites on the web and the many alternatives that each user has, this is not at all surprising.
What to Do
Do your best to create fresh, original, relevant, high-quality content for your visitors this year, and Google will reward you with a top search engine position. Dodgy competitions won’t be able to outrank you no matter what black hat SEO practices they might use.
Marketers too need to focus on the content. Link-worthy content is going to be the staple of online marketing strategies, and those marketers who invest in it rather than in advertising or other outbound marketing techniques will be the big winners this year.
