Over the past year I have noticed a trend developing amongst my SEO clients. “Traditional” SEO clients are slowly but surely getting replaced by more SEO/content marketing/social media clients—those that want the whole inbound marketing package. These social SEO clients recognize that the world of SEO is changing. With the growing power of social media marketing, the search engines placing added importance on fresh content and the ever changing algorithms, traditional link building on its own may no longer be enough to win the SEO race.
The people behind Google and Bing are exceptionally smart and they recognize that a lot of black hat SEO practitioners and site owners are always looking for ways to trick the search algorithm and artificially boost their own site’s position in the SERP. Some traditional link building tactics, like link exchanges, have effectively been outlawed by the search engines because too many sites tried to take advantage of them. That’s why Google now incorporates 200 ranking factors when creating the SERP, to prevent any one tactic from weighing too heavily in a site’s favor.
Traditional link building activities like online PR, blog commenting and article marketing are all very important components of an SEO campaign, but soon they may no longer be enough to rest the success of your website on. As 2012 unfolds, I believe social signals are going to become an even more important factor to the success of SEO. The Bing-Facebook integration in May was just the beginning of social and search merging. Google+ was the next step. What’s coming up?
The recent “freshness” update from Google also makes me believe that content marketing is going to become a key component of SEO in 2012. Since websites can’t reasonably be expected to update pages of their website every few weeks (what would be the point of changing something just to change it?), business blogging, guest blogging and article marketing are going to become major link and brand building activities.
The search engines like to see a diverse approach to link building and a strong link portfolio that has a lot different link sources. Relying too heavily on one traditional link building tactic could land your site in hot water should the search engines ever declare that tactic “black hat.” It also limits your potential because you aren’t actively taking advantage of every opportunity. By increasing the amount of content your brand is publishing, you are not only developing great sources of inbound links, but you are also creating fodder for your social networks. Every piece of content you create can be shared on a social networking site and, as I said before, those social signals are crucial.
