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We all know what happened last year. Though we’ve seen quite a few online marketing achievements online last 2013, the Hummingbird came in the scene and focused more on “Semantic search“.  But in reality, this update that surprised a few online marketers out there, bringing down websites like buildings much like the Kaiju’s from Pacific Rim, is just the icing on top of a fat cake that is still being baked…

 

That cake was then served (or what seems like a part of it) a few months ago when Google decided to give out updates:

 

*click to fully view

 

This was taken from MOZ and their summary of all the recent algorithm updates.

 

A lot of the websites that were still having spammy like queries started having trouble. Big trouble. Because rankings started sinking and disappearing down onto the deep abyss.

Sometimes it’s surprising that most of the website owners and manages today, still resort to such cheap, quick and easy ways on how to get by and rank past their competitors online. I personally have seen cases recently on how website owners “take care” of their websites. Thin content, (or no content at all) stuffing their sitemap taggings with keywords in hopes of “optimizing their tags for the search engines”.

 

Tags are now for people, NOT for robots

You just have to lay it down that straight. In today’s modern world, everything has to adapt and change according to their environment which is, as a matter of fact, also evolving. Back then you could just stuff all the keywords you can think of on the title tags, meta descriptions etc. Today, since Google has been serving up what humans are really looking for on search results, you’d have to understand that Google will only give your website good ranking on pages/sites with tags that people can understand.

So instead of something that looks like this:

 

Title Tag: Top Singapore Professional Wedding Photographer, Glamour Photography
Meta Description: Glamour Photography, Top Singapore Professional Wedding Photographer,

 

*Not much thought, just a bunch of jumbled up words really. Of course if we add it all up together in our heads we could probably determine what the page is about. But if you compare it with a page that contains more descriptive sentences, this’ll look like a sketchy website. People will be wary of clicking it. Or even worse, they may think that this site/page is infested with spam.

 

So you ought to fix it to make it look like this:

 

Title Tag: Singapore Professional Wedding Photographer | Glamour Photography | (Brand name or Page)
Meta Description: An Award winning photographer from Singapore (website/website owner) is known for his quirky and different approach through his lens.

 

*The title tag’s keywords and brand name are arranged in such a way that the keywords are seen first. Then the description actually has a distinct thought because it’s a sentence. A real description.

 

*Of course making your meta descriptions look all pretty won’t have any effect on ranking to be honest. But it will serve as an important aspect that will make sure that people will quickly understand what your site (or a certain page) is about and if this is, in fact, what they are looking for.

 

In short, like in nature, if you don’t evolve, you die.

 

*There are a whole slew of other types of things to learn about when trying to keep up with the times to make sure your website (and therefore your business) grows. You can read all about them below:

 

Passive Link Building Secrets
– A post exploring ways on how you can do less to make your website rank better.
How Having No Follow Links Could Actually Help You
– This post explains the importance of the types of links you’d want to have, most especially for Google’s standards today.

 

Also, remember that everything is going mobile

Google is quickly adapting and changing to conform to its new environment where majority of the planet’s inhabitants use smart phones and tablets. So in a sense, a website’s mobile performance must also be at the top of its game for it to go places and survive the ever changing war for ranks. So the designs of websites need to be designed (or maybe re-designed) for mobile use first then be enlarged or scaled up later for bigger screens.

 

 

*click to fully view

 

*This is a screen cap of YouTube.Com. from a mobile device.
Observe how:
1. Everything has been modified and optimized for mobile use and
2. since the user is logged on with her G+ on her device, everything that will be shown when she access YouTube will be based on what she’s been searching for lately. Sports, movies etc.

 

Google remembers what the user wants to see and gives out search results related to what the user wants to see.

 

This is definitely one of the top priorities that search engine optimization experts need to prioritize this 2014. These small updates and changes that happened last year is actually only helping the search engine to prepare for the increase of voice searches as well that is, of course,  associated with the increased number of use of mobile devices. This will also have heavy effects on how you should create or structure every type of content you put out there on the web.

 

Speaking of Content…

Content marketing, (although we all know that it’s not all that’s required for your site to rank, you also need your site to be “healthy” an optimized properly) will only grow larger and will still snow ball this 2014.
You’ll need to have (and take advantage of) these things.
First is to have very helpful, very targeted, very direct to the point and regular content. These recent updates bodes ill fate for content that doesn’t really present any useful or helpful data/topics for people reading it. Then you’ll need to have ’em always fresh and up to date. This means that your site is always on the dot and always up to date which then means that your site is growing.

 

We’ve already written a bit about content marketing before. Check it out:
Content Marketing: The Party You Were Missing Out On
– We’ve posted this to explain the gravity and importance of content for websites.

 

By doing all of these, all your content will easily be more visible and would automatically make people share and spread all the information that you have shared. Which now brings us to:

 

Social Media

These past few years a lot of big social media sites emerged quickly like Facebook and Twitter. As well as a few ones that feature mainly visual content like Instagram and Pinterest. And these things will inevitably grow larger this year. Again, mainly because of the rise in use of mobile devices. Having the power to interact with more people on such sites will absolutely give you the edge you need for you and your site. (or Company) The more you interact with your targeted audience the more they’ll trust and remember you. That’s the whole point of using social media to your advantage. Interaction.

 

Abandoning Old Shells

SEO will never have a permanent face shape or form. It will forever evolve into different things each time algorithms get scrambled. Search engines change algorithms or reset them only because they continually try to find new ways to serve and offer better information faster. Hence SEO will also have to adapt forever with all these changes as well as find new ways on how to combat and move around upon the search engine’s ever changing environment.

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