FEATURE
THE COMPREHENSIVE
GUIDE TO SEO IN 2014
Leading SEO expert, Dave Naylor, provides an in-depth analysis of the SEO landscape for 2014, and
how affiliates will need to adapt to a whiter-than-white hat strategy.
SEO HAS NEVER been a static skill set.
Instead, the evolution and willingness to
adapt to suit your needs in the best possible
way, has always been the only way to be
able to hold those coveted number one
rankings within organic search. But 2013
was a tough year that saw almost everyone
have to re-evaluate their working practice or
risk being sent into the Internet abyss; the
coldest, darkest part of the Internet that you
could ever imagine.
Being found online has always been the
ultimate aim of search engine optimisation,
working to ensure that your website is
covered with enough stars and sparkles
to attract the search engine rankings
algorithms; to dazzle them with your
fantastic content, authoritative status both
as a website as well as the link profile that
your site has successfully created for itself,
and not to mention the bustling social
avenues that you have wide open, all in
the hope that your website is deemed to be
the most suited to hold the number one
organic ranking for whichever keyword you
are focusing towards.
Admittedly, being found is not as simple
as the fairy dust and glitter that I have
shared with you here, but the objective is
exactly the same: working towards showing
the search engines that your site is the best
possible website to display for that specific
term for that specific user. However, things
are not as clear cut as they have been in
previous years, not by a long stretch of
the imagination.
The fact of the matter is that search
engines are continuously looking to evolve,
enhance and empower their organic results
and the biggest of the select group, Google,
has taken huge steps towards improving
the quality of its user experience after
various updates to algorithm equations and
tolerance of manipulation in the most part.
Google 2013 –
the year of change
Google has never hidden the fact that
it makes changes to its search engine
algorithms, instead, it consistently reminds
us that it makes over 500 changes to its
algorithms every year, working towards
cleaning up the Internet to offer a better
user experience than ever before. Google
entered 2012 with big plans in mind,
and the results sent tremors through the
online community; tremors that continued
throughout 2013.
Knowing that ranking manipulation was
on the increase, the quality of some of
the websites that were holding higher
ranking positions for competitive and
non-competitive keywords were of the
lowest possible quality, and tha BW6W'2vW&P