11 Things We Learned About SEO In 2014

At this time of year I get to sit down and reflect on what’s been happening the last 12 months in search engine optimisation.

This hasn’t been a rollercoaster year for SEO. If 2012/13 marked a big turning points, this year there has been hardly a ripple.

Even so, there are 10 things to take away from 2014 that you may find useful to know in 2015.

• Business owners remain just as fickle when it comes to SEO services. This may be due to the unrealistic promises of page one rankings made by many firms. Unfortunately, there is still no magic formula to get to page one for highly competitive keywords, it takes hard work and consistent effort.
  
  
• The 3-month rule remains a myth – at least in most cases. It is impossible to place a timeframe on when a website will rank for a genuinely competitive keyword on a national level, even if it is possible on local searches where there is a lot less competition.
  
  
• If you write a blog it should answer queries or present something useful and interesting to readers. Writing anything else is search engine fodder and mostly a waste of time and effort as it has always been and will continue to be.
  
  
• Online press releases are still one of the best ways to build links and get important Google news exposure for your brand.
  
  
• Social signals or the engagement your brand attracts on social media continues to be an important part of SEO.
  
  
• Blog posts need to be longer and they must be informative and original to rank on Google. 600 words or more seems to be the optimum. What hasn’t changed is that people also need to share and comment on what you are writing.
  
  
• Content marketing continues to grow in importance. If you want to do SEO now, you need some element of content marketing or eventually lose your ranking to those websites that do have it.
  
  
• Editing meta titles correctly is still important.
  
  
• Negative SEO is possible. Google can penalise a website for having lots of spammy links. The good news is that it will require tens of thousands of suspicious links pointing at a website for this to happen.
  
  
• Exact match domains are not guaranteed top position on Google although they can still give you an edge on SERPS for less competitive search terms.
  
  
• SEO has grown to encompass more and more skill sets. A good SEO consultant will find it useful to be a writer, networker, web developer, social media marketer, analyst and copywriter or maybe superman!

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