Surrey SEO Web trends in 2012

Hi David,

Hmm, I’ve just been looking at the SEO section of that article and speed isn’t very high up (non-cached page load speed is a factor, and becoming more important ever since they 1st introduced it). Google is trying to adopt "if it’s good for users, it’s good for SEO", which in my opinion isn’t a bad thing. Webmasters should always design for people, and if you get that right, the SEO falls in place

Good to see some one reading up on their SEO, although in my opinion, it’s not something that should truly be studied (or at least not chased) in doing so, you will often defy the point. Every time you know what the "best approaches are" for 20XX, by 20XX +1 you’re efforts have almost always been dismally reduced. But if you create the site with users in mind, you’re never left behind.

Algorithm chasing is a hard race that will leave people wheezing and panting even though the next race is just about to begin.

I don’t disagree with the article, but it’s fairly similar to things circulating around 2-3 years ago

"Good bye page rank" is something that’s been said for a long time (many years). PR (Page Rank: Larry Page’s coined term for a measure of inbound links) is one of over 200 factors that’s included in calculating SERP results. It’s still significant, but not as significant as many web-masters believe (and as such, web-masters often pay too much attention to it)

If you follow Matt Cutts, it’s been on the cards for a while that they’re reducing the "importance" of page rank and paying more attention to other trends (Google have been trying hard to break in to the social networking for a long time, so it’s not hard to guess what trends)

Page rank has been abused for quite some time (if you create a system where people can vote for their selves, of course it’s going become corrupt, I’ve even seen local councils sites attempt to abuse it). However, I believe it will phase out but never completely die, just reduce in importance.

I think Google are really trying to sell Google +1, to be honest it’s flopping a bit, but it seems they’re not giving up, and they have one of the worlds most powerfull marketing tools, so it might not be long until people are more familiar with Google +1

Freshness has always been a factor,
The Caffeine update in 2009 allowed Google to grab more content at a faster refresh rate, so fresh content has been important for some time, it is definitely worth thinking about if you own a "stale" website…. update the content, make it "web2.0" so users can contribute and make the site regenerative, then put the fresh content at the surface (at a place where it’s easy to find & index)

Quality… that one has been knocking about for a while…


Some of Cutt’s Videos for good measure:

Social is Key to SEO in 2011




Social factors (Twitter, Facebook etc) as a ranking factor 2010


Some SEO myths (2011)


Matt Cutts on Page Rank Sculpting (2009)


Will SEO still exist in five years (2009)

I don’t know if they will "never take off", analytics are still useful to individuals, but I don’t think they can always give a fair/accurate measure when the content from a user account is generated by many users

"What’s safe to say is that in 2012 you won’t just measure websites but also people."

People can tweet just about anything they want (for instance, the entire surrey related content/ media on Surrey Forum is auto-tweeted). Some businesses have many users, some great content writers, others not so good, yet it often gets tweeted/republished using one account, so I think the metrics can be a little skewed

(I’ve just started using klout)