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4 Sure Fire Deadly SEO Practices For 2014

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Are you wondering what SEO will work in 2014? Yes, there are plenty of good practices and habits out there that online marketing folks would do well to heed and explore—if they haven’t already. Here are a few:

#1. Optimize your site for mobile use

This is one of the first things for a site owner to do. Many people surf the Internet, check their emails and basically go online using their smartphones. If the site isn’t optimized, then it’ll be hard for customers. Rather than explore, they’ll just move on—not because they’re finicky creatures but because your site’s navigation is a mess.

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#2. Be active on social media

Social media could very well turn out to be a game changer. Already, some sites that have little to no SEO still get a lot of traffic through their social channels. Imagine how much that figure would grow if they start optimizing the site for search engines as well.

#3. Quality in content

This one’s non-negotiable. Some companies, in the year the Panda update was released, were using a spammy technique, known to many as the spinning technique. It was a system that essentially allowed for alternate words or synonyms to be exchanged within more or less the same sentence structure.

Basically, you had a sentence and would exchange words in that sentence with a synonym so ‘yellow is good,’ if spun could read as something like ‘the shade of yellow is great, the yellow color is wonderful, the color yellow is good, the color and shade of yellow is awesome, the yellow is awesome, the yellow is a color that is good, the yellow color isn’t bad,’ etc. Can you imagine spinning that sentence a hundred times? Well, an online marketing agency or two certainly did – up until the Panda update put an end to those efforts.

#4. Quality in links

This is non-negotiable too. Strong links, quality links, mean that your site gets indexed, that it gets top status in the rankings – which gets you more visitors and more conversion. The higher the numbers, the better. And since Google has a vendetta against spammy content, link builders today now operate with more rules and restrictions than ever before. That’s good news for white hat SEO folks. For black hat folks? Not so much.

This means too that link builders are now extra careful in the sites they choose. After all, a single mistake could result in Google throwing them into the pit, along with the rest of other unranked, spammy sites. Game zero.

Still, in the end, Search Engine Optimization – or SEO – isn’t built on anything solid – and won’t be, for quite some time. That’s to say, it isn’t built on a set of rules, because aside from points 2-4, you’ve got to expect that the rules will keep on changing, especially for 2014. And all we can do is cope with whatever those changes will be and bring.

Images: ”An illustration featuring a laptop computer with SEO concept and a magnifying glass in front of the laptop / Shutterstock.com“

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