With the past year and a half of Google cracking down on scraped content, automated backlinking, and “over doing” SEO, it forces you to think of doing SEO in a completely different way.

Google has been emphasizing high quality information on websites along with “natural” looking backlinks and most of all more Social Media Interaction.

If we are to compare what high search ranking is as compared to high quality information, natural backlinks and Social Media interaction, it is basically the same thing as saying you site is participating in a “popularity” contest of sorts.

What is SEO, really? It is a race to get your website to the first page of search and preferably the number one top spot, there. According to Google with their “hot map” research on where visitors are likely to click, if you rank in the number one position on the first page of Google, you stand to get about 42% of all clicks for that niche or topic. It dramatically drops off to 11% for second place, 7% of all clicks for third place, and from there, it goes down, down, down.

So, armed with knowing you have to be concerned with:

1. high quality/relevant information
2. secure naturally looking backlinks from low, medium and high authority sites
3. active and interactive with social media

In addition, I would also suggest to be more proactive in getting ranked for the “longer tail” keywords. Long Tail Keywords are defined here.

Long Tail Keywords initially meant a little longer keyword phrase within the same or related to the niche you are in. In 2013, you need to rank for the longer tail keywords/phrases. This means that most of the competition has most of the shorter Long Tail keywords taken and is very competitive to even compete with those. Now, you need to capture the more obscure and longer keyword phrases that cover your niche.

So, for example, let’s say your keyword is “knitting.” A typical long tail keyword would be “cross stitch knitting” or “cross stitch knitting patterns.” Now, consider using a longer phrase such as, “cross stitching knitting instructions for beginners video…” Doing a longer tail keyword phrase does two things for you. 1) it allows you to rank higher in the search engines in a much shorter time. 2) it allows you to stay on page on, number one almost forever, which is great because then it becomes a “set and forget” way of doing SEO.

So remember, the smartest thing you can do for 2013 is to revamp your practice of how you get your ranking. If you follow the main three steps listed above, you can’t go wrong.

In our next blog post, we will be going deeper into how you use interactivity in the social media world to attract more visitors and get more customers to your business.