5 SEO Trends Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know for 2015

"Is SEO dead?" It's a common question within the online marketing world today. If you're an entrepreneur relying on a strong online presence to connect with customers, you're right to pay attention. It's undeniable that the SEO landscape is changing.

For instance, Google is taking a hardline approach. Shady link-building tactics (think Rap Genius), poor quality content and bad design are just a few of the factors causing websites to get penalized. So what's worked for your business in the past may no longer work, and in fact, could actually hurt your business now.

Today, successful SEO strategies have to incorporate diverse components including brand building, mobile optimization, content marketing and social media integration. It's time to adapt your strategy to address these realities. Here's a closer look at five trends that will shape your SEO success in the year ahead.

1. Effective SEO has three pillars. A strong SEO strategy has three core components: links, content and social media. What's become more pronounced in the last year is the relationship between these elements. Content must be laser focused on your audience's needs and honed to drive specific profit-generating actions. Social media amplifies your reach, signaling to search engines that users find your content valuable. Links from high quality sites also reinforce that you're a solid, trustworthy site. A virtuous cycle is starting to emerge that all begins with writing great content.

2. The rise of content marketing moves toward digital maturity.Content marketing was the top marketing buzzword of 2013, and it's a trend that's here to stay. Brands need to become savvy about telling their own stories and creating content that resonates with audiences. As the initial fascination with content marketing wears off, marketers are now demanding more return on investment, or ROI. Content marketing is maturing, and as a result we're better able to effectively target content, measure performance and correct course to improve results.

3. Mobile optimization is no longer optional. With the release of Google's Hummingbird updates, it's getting harder for sites without a mobile strategy to rank well. This includes both a responsive design and a mobile content strategy. Realistically, it's time to invest in this anyway from a business perspective: Half of Americans own smartphones and more than a third own tablets according to Pew Internet. Responsive design ensures that your site looks great across a range of mobile devices. A mobile content strategy targets your content to the context, needs and behaviors of mobile users. To learn more about post-Hummingbird mobile optimization, read The Key Ingredients to a Winning Mobile Content-Marketing Strategy.

4. Building your brand is more important than building links. A strong brand is playing an increasingly important role in SEO. One tangible example is Google's introduction and emphasis of Google Authorship, a program that connects content to your author profile with recognized authors' content performing better in search engine results. Building your brand and thought leadership in your space are critical steps to ranking well over time. For help building and implement a branding strategy, see this collection of resources.

5. Social media, especially Google Plus, plays an integrated role with SEO. Google is relying more than ever on human signals in the form of shares and mentions on social media to help vet sites. If you don't have a strong social media marketing presence and a strategy that makes it easy for people to share your content, it's time to implement one (for help with that, I recommend "How to Determine Which Social Media Network Fits Your Business."

Social media has matured to the point where it's intersecting with SEOto help determine search rankings. Two easy places to start are building your Google Plus presence and ensuring that your website and blog have content sharing modules built in.

As you're developing your company's SEO plan, remember that all these trends add up to two things: integration and balance. Invest in all the key areas -- from writing good content, to building links and developing your social platforms -- with the understanding that they mutually support each other. Customize your plan by identifying your company's gaps and opportunity, and focus on the channels that bring you closer to your audience. Good search engines rankings will follow.

SEO Tactics and Strategies You Need to Know This Year

Effective Online Marketing and SEO Strategies

As search engines continue to evolve, marketers must improve their skills to keep up. According to reports 70 percent of the links search users click are from SEO. Also, inbound leads (i.e. SEO) cost 61 percent less than outbound leads (i.e. cold calling).

SEO has a better return on investment (ROI) as well. "SEO leads have a 14.6 percent close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7 percent close rate," according to the same report.

Now that you know SEO is the way to go, here are 11 SEO tactics that you need to know in 2015:

1. Creating Incredible Content That Earns Links

Even after all of the changes with the search engine algorithms, inbound SEO links are still the biggest influence for search engines. This is unlikely to change. On the other hand, other methods of link acquisition have changed. Earning a link from a high-quality, relevant website will not only help with your SEO but also with referral traffic, which can lead to more sales and brand exposure. Creating incredible content that people will want to share is still the best way to earn links. Every time a search engine finds your website next to your competitors, it tells them that your company is in a related niche. To get co-citation links, do a search for "best" or "top 10" items in your niche.

2. Co-Citation Links

Example: top 10 blue widgets

If you do this search and don’t find your business in the results, get in touch with the publisher and ask that your company be added to the list. Be prepared to justify why your company should be included and where appropriate, give them a summary to go along with a link.

3. Editorial Links

Editorial links can be some of the most powerful for SEO because they come from other publications in your niche mentioning your company. They can also come from thought leadership guest posts that you write and get published on third-party sites.

The easiest way to get editorial links is to create outstanding content that people will want to share with their readers. Another way is to guest post on a high-quality site that is in your niche. Be prepared to create incredible content that may be heavily scrutinized before publishing.

Interviews are another way to get editorial links.

As part of the interview, you should be allowed to cite your work in your responses. This can lead to even more backlinks and traffic.

4. The Broken Link-Building Method

Here’s another white-hat link-building strategy that can be quite effective. In this case, you’re actually helping publishers fix broken links, which can be helpful to their readers. However, this only works if your content is good enough to replace the lost content. To do the broken link-building method, you must find broken links on a site that is relevant to your niche. You then contact the webmaster with the broken link and recommend your site as an alternative to the broken link. To find out more, you can read the broken link-building Bible at the Moz blog.

5. Link Reclamation

Link reclamation can help you get fresh links by finding broken links to your site and having the publisher fix them. Examples:

• Find brand mentions about your site and ask the publisher to add a link
• Find places where your content has been used without attribution (places where people have used your post or infographics without giving you credit) and request a link from the person

According to Kristi Hines with kristihines.com, "A lot of people think of link reclamation as just 301'ing pages they have moved that still have a lot of great backlinks. But I like to think of reclamation as more than that. I like to think of it as not just reclaiming, but claiming links you deserve." In order to make this automated, you can set up a Google Alert to email you whenever your company’s brand is mentioned. You can then check that page to find out if they link to your site.

6. Link Outreach

Link outreach is a bit "old school" but can still be quite powerful. To do this, find a website that is relevant to yours and get their contact information from the site. Send them an email or call and politely ask them for link. This works better if the site has a slightly different business than yours but may share a common audience.

7. Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is nothing new, and companies have been researching their competitor’s links for years. However, by looking at the competitor’s backlinks and manually reviewing which links are worth having, you can then perform a link outreach and try to get a link from the same referring site.

8. Focus on ROI Instead of Keyword Rankings

While we all enjoy seeing the keywords rank well in the search engines, this doesn’t necessarily mean your SEO campaign is successful. It’s possible to rank number one for many keywords that have no real ROI. Instead, you should focus on metrics that bring conversions.

9. Create an SEO Strategy That Maps to an Audience

Over the past few years, we’ve lost most of the keyword data in Google Analytics and other tools. This has required marketers to change from traditional methods of SEO to create new ways of segmenting their audiences. In order to do this we must find new keywords to focus on, new ways to approach neighboring markets, and determine where our competition is succeeding with SEO and how you can do it better. The days of stuffing keywords into bad content and having it rank are long gone. Now your content needs to focus on your target persona and your keywords need to flow within the content. This is why it’s so important that content and SEO be tied closely together.

10. Optimize for Yahoo, Bing, and Others

Search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo may slowly take a bigger piece of Google’s pie in 2015. Yahoo is now the default search engine for Firefox. Safari had a deal with Google, which is supposed to end in 2015, and Yahoo and Bing are both trying to become the default search engine for the browser. As other search engines become the default Web browsers instead of Google, it makes sense to optimize for those search engines as well.

11. Mobile SEO

Mobile is becoming more popular every year. Every website should have a mobile marketing strategy for 2015 and beyond. "May [2014] turned out to be a banner month for mobile as it delivered on some huge milestones which underscored just how impressive the medium’s ascendance has been in the past few years. Mobile platforms – smartphones and tablets – combined to account for 60 percent of total digital media time spent, up from 50 percent a year ago," says comScore.

Mobile should be a core part of any SEO plan in 2015. However, you must be cautious as configuration errors caused a 68 percent loss of traffic, according to BrightEdge.

Conclusion

Creating an SEO strategy can give your company and brand a boost in the search engines. Why not improve your ROI today?

Source - http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2396193/11-seo-tactics-you-need-to-know-in-2015