SEO News Roundup for 2013While many heralded the death of SEO – again – search engine optimization was still around in 2013 and will most likely be around in 2014 and following years. All you need to do is look at some of the biggest SEO news stories of the last year below to see that quite a bit is happening in the SEO industry.

Big SEO News of 2013

Here’s a look at some specific and general stories and topics that were big in the SEO world during the last twelve months. You probably know about all of these, but it’s fun to have them all in one place.

  • Link Spammers – More companies were outed for both buying and selling links in 2013. While the number of large organizations that got caught was perhaps smaller than in other recent years, there were still quite a few who got caught.

  • Content Marketing – Looking at stories like this one, it’s easy to see that content marketing continued to be a very important discussion topic and news item in 2013. More companies are starting to develop a clear cut content marketing plan.

  • Social Networks – Social media signals were another big news topic for the SEO world in 2013. While Google and others aren’t really saying how much social network signals like retweets and likes have an effect on search engine rankings, it’s evident they’re being used.

  • Paid vs Organic – As it has become more and more difficult to rank organically in the search engines due to all the competition, a lot of companies are starting to utilize Facebook advertising or even Adwords in order to get traffic to their site.

  • Google Analytics – As in previous years, Google has tightened what information they make available through Google Analytics. This is a shame because it’s an easy way for webmasters to find ways to make their sites better.

  • PageRank – Google’s PageRank was also not updated all year, a sign that it might not be coming back publicly. At least one rumor of a Google employee saying it was broke and not a priority has been reported, but Google isn’t saying too much about it.

  • Old School SEO – This is dying. The brute force methods of yesteryear simply do not work anymore. This is good news for the quality of information on the web, but bad news for those who like to take the easy way out when producing websites.

  • Mobile SEO – This is one area of SEO that experienced growth in 2013 and will likely continue to become more important next year. Optimizing for mobile devices is relatively easy, but a lot of companies still haven’t done it yet.
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    Will SEO still be around in 2014 and beyond? According to Nick Smith, this is entirely possible in the near future. No matter what you’re trying to sell online, you really need to get in the head of potential consumers. Thanks to the Internet, this is actually easier than it sounds.