Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last several years, it is pretty common knowledge that traditional SEO has evolved to include many facets of online marketing. Sure what we call on-page SEO still remains an important, foundational tactic but the modern day SEO has many other things that they need to employ in order to experience success in organic search marketing.
The following infographic details both the OLD vs NEW approaches to SEO. And while some of the tactics listed in the infographic have never been good SEO, it does clearly demonstrates how SEO is now a multi faceted discipline of digital marketing.
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Hi David,
This is nothing short of brilliant. Hopefully this will make some old school SEOers realise the old stuff simple doesn’t work any more.
What an excellent visual representation of today’s SEO. Probably the first time I have seen anything about SEO and understood it the first time I read it.
Excellent inforgraphic on SEO both previous and current. I think it sums up everything very beautifully.
ONsite factors above are definitely true. The quality, uniqueness, visitor retention, multimedia aspect of your actual website know play a far more important part than just gaining links and trash traffic as far as SERPS gains go.
However Links still represent well over 60% of your ranking “fuel” in competitive niches – though this is down considerably from 2010 where it was over 80% (Google “Google ranking factors November 2012” and the first listing should explain this in detail with a study of over 450,000 sites and 75 million individual URL’s that is reiterated every 3 months to find out what individual factors inform serp movements on a metametric scale.
As for offsite SEO..
Great bullet points and a good representation of the way some things are moving. However, most of them just aren’t true….yet.
While they certainly seem to represent the way the search engines WOULD LIKE SEO to work, in practice this just isn’t the case.
The sad thing is – just because you want SEO to be like the “right hand side” up there. In practice, although there is subtle movement in that direction, most of what is on the left is still a far quicker and more cost effective way to promote sites and gain SERP improvements in late 2012
In life – just because something is common sense and SHOULD be true – doesn’t make it so, and SEO cartainly is a category where that truism applies.
EMD leveling and commercial keyword anchor text spamming aside, everything else on the list that could still be construed as “spam” still seems to work just fine.
A quick look at the backlink metrics at a few thousand sites that are page one for commercial terms reveals an inordinate number of blog comments, forum profiles, guest book “empty” links, inbounds from weak article and WIKI sites (with no page rank and no age.authority etc).
Of course Google WANTS to reduce spam and have a better directory order. It blows the trumpets and lays out the bunting with every update as if it’s “Job Done”.
If you want to build a website with a long term future in mind. I would certainlky aim to provide the best onsite quality and have a far better linking profile (made over a longer period, using better content, adding value to the 3rd party sites you link from etc)
But if you want to rank NOW in December 2012 – then sadly a few scraped and spun articles and a Xrumer blast seems to do the trick very well in many niches. Perhaps better than ever.
I think a last imporantt point here is to acknowledge that Google sets no absolute standard. There is a “number one in Google” for every possible phrase you can imagine.
For your site to get there you just need to be that fraction of a percent better than the site that comes in second. And in spammy/trash niches (where there is often still a lot of cash to be made) beating the terrible competition that is there is not hard to do and does not require a particularly ethical or “none spammy” mind set.
David this is amazing. I’ve gone through the infographic twice and picked up new things the second time around. I haven’t seen anything else that shows the information in a way that is so easily understood.
Now I know what happened last google update. But I just wonder that my EMD site sill on first page on google search as well as my friends’ site. I think there is still a way to get good serp regardless on above explanation.
I am recommending this to all of my contact list interested in do it yourself seo. Everyone should look at this infographic to find out what they need to be doing differently in 2013 to create long-term website brands that Google will love. Way to go love it!
Nigel
Yes agree, on-page SEO still remains an important, foundational tactic for the SEO.