We know it’s been awhile since our last newsletter, but we hope this newsletter finds everyone well. We thought we would quickly discuss the year of 2012 in the world of SEO and give some insight into where we think 2013 will take us.

In 2012 Google released algorithm updates to its search engine ranking process at an unprecedented rate. New concepts like “AuthorRank”, “Link Disavow Tool” and “Social Signal vs Backlinks” challenged SEO experts to review current strategies.

Even as recently as December 21st Google announced its 23rd Panda update since the first Panda algorithm change was introduced on February 24, 2011. Everyone of these updates required SEO experts to verify and/or adjust their strategies to make sure the rankings of their client’s websites were not adversely affected.

The Penguin update to Google’s algorithm was launched in April of 2012 and its main intention was to help target webspam by penalizing the search result rankings for sites that violated Google’s quality guidelines, especially in terms of links. Caught in the crossfire of Google’s never ending war on spam or perceived spam were many websites that likely got penalised who didn’t consider themselves to be engaging in any spam. Another unintended consequence of this update, as many webmasters claimed, was that it was now easier than ever for reputable websites to be penalized by a competitor’s unethical behavior. With Google’s newly released “Link Disavow Tool” an experienced and expert SEO firm will be able to use this tool to effectively prevent possible industrial sabotage by competitors and protect the rankings and visibility of their clients.

2012 was also the year that the business of SEO finally went mainstream. Two episodes of the ABC hit TV show, the Good Wife, dealt with the subject of SEO. One involving a fictious search engine company named ChumHum and the legalities of having a business’ rankings being blacklisted within that search engine.

SEO was also referenced in a number of mainstream cartoons like Dilbert. Media companies like Comcast and Time Warner began to advertise their inhouse (albeit rudimentary) SEO services in prime time commercials. It has become clear that SEO has finally matured from its initial infancy and is now becoming a standard tool in the tool-belt of all small businesses that want to effectively compete for new customers who now almost exclusively use the internet to find business information. However, with this maturity, the darker side of scams, inexperience and never ending solicitations have also caused further confusion and financial pain for the small business owner.

2012 was also the year that foreign based hacker groups and cyber-mafias from countries like Russia, China, Romania and the Middle East signaled that they would start targeting small and mid-sized business owners. The reasoning for this was that smaller companies have increasingly become dependent on the internet but have not invested in the appropriate security measures to protect their online assets. Now that many small business owners depend on the internet for a large percentage of their business but have minimal to zero online defenseses against hackers, 2013 will make these types of sites prime targets. The concept of cyber-blackmail will become more mainstream as well, where a foreign group is able to take a companies website down and try to force the business owner to pay a ransom for ending their overseas “denial of service attack”.

The other insidious and less obvious use for a small business owner’s website is to hijack it and use it as an attack vector against larger companies and banks. The attack is eventually traced back to the red-faced business owner who now has to waste valuable time and resources proving they were not involved in the hacker attack. This is probably the most damaging and highest risk exploit a small business owner can face.

So what will 2013 bring us and why will it be even more critical to be aligned with an experienced, expert SEO firm that has a breadth of knowledge in areas as diverse as security, design, copywriting, artificial intelligence, algorithm function, and of course a strong background in computer programming?

2013 will bring us more sophistication in the newest search engine algorithms where blended search will be more prevelant, social media markers will be added and/or enhanced in the search engine algorithms and the rise of “Personalized Search Results” will become more pervasive. All of these factors will require greater sophistication in future SEO strategies and analysis and tracking will become even more tricky. Google Local and Google+ will continue to gain increased visibility in Google’s blended search results. Converison rates and page loading speeds will also become more important and will require that SEO marketers be even more aggressive in their conversion rate testing and analytics tracking.

2013 will also bring more sophisticated hacker exploits and cybercrime to the front door of the regional business owner. This will make having an SEO firm that you can trust critical and will require that they stay on top of the new trends and not outsource mission critical efforts overseas.

Finally in 2013 business competition for good SEO firms and the new emphasis on copywriting, more careful link building, social media activities, brand management and monitoring, user reviews, and outreach activities required to obtain valuable and high quality links will drive up the costs of implementing a winning strategy and will unfortunately make SEO more expensive given the small number of successful SEO experts available.

All of this will make the “barriers to entry” for new businesses to gain visibiliy on the internet that much more difficult. Whereas, for companies that have implemented SEO in the past and achieved good results they will have to be that much more careful with future strategies so that efforts aren’t wiped out by a new and /or inexperienced SEO firm. 2013 will require that on a site that has been highly optimized and has a precise coding profile in terms of specific search terms, that future changes don’t inadvertantly wipe out all the progress that has been made. A one sentence change on your homepage could be the difference between a 1st page ranking in Google and a second or third page ranking in Google. This happened to one of our clients where an inadvertant change made by someone else caused one of their important search rankings to go from #22 to #>100 in a matter of weeks. Months of work were wiped out. We will be able to correct it because we caught it fairly quick, but it was a good lesson to everyone involved on just how quickly a simple change could spiral into a devasting loss of web traffic and potential business.

We at SlickRockWeb hope to make 2013 an even better year for you and we will continue to rely on our more than 10 years of experience in SEO to accomplish the marketing goals that each of our clients set. SEO strategies in 2013 are certain to include careful assessment and optimization of content, increased web performance through enhanced loading speeds and decreased bounce rates, further enhancing the user experience, continuing reputation management and monitoring negative reviews and press and finding new ways to blend in social media signals. Layered over all of this will be a renewed sense of vigilance to monitor and enhance web security when needed.

Happy New Year from all of us at SlickRockWeb Inc.

Mr McNamara Company News, SEO and SEM