I don’t know about other bloggers, but I personally have mixed feelings on my blogging success in 2012. It goes in waves. At some point of your blogging carrier, you see that your certain steps lead to the foreseen results, and you feel proud that you know some rules of the game. But soon you realize that it does not work as expected… As you play the game, and you learnt the rules. But suddenly somebody is changing the rules, and you start learning again, what is important, and what is not.
Definitely, there are basic rules, which never change. Like, good original content is always better than bad copied content from other site. But still…
Today, I would like to offer you another blogger insight. The guest post on Daily Blog Tips is presented by Dipendra Pokharel (http://www.meronagar.com/)
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Google: like it or not, you can’t live without it. This is true for everyday people, and for webmasters and bloggers even more. In this post I’ll talk about some changes I noticed in the search engine in 2012.
This year I made 3 new blogs on WordPress. All three were top level domains while they were on different niche. The niches were productivity, games and careers.
I built an almost equal amount of backlinks for the first two sites, which means I spend equal time promoting them. As for content updates, one of the sites was updated more frequently than the others.
On the third site I didn’t spend much time building links, and instead I focused on social media promotion, including Google +, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I was both building a profile for my site and getting mentions from other people.
The result was interesting, as I found that search traffic on the site that was promoted via social media was higher if compared to my other two blogs. What I found using Google Webmaster Tools was that my blog had many +1 on search results, and this was improving my search rankings. In other words, the +1 widget and Google+ mentions can really help your site these days.
Another thing I learned in 2012 was that effective link building is much more about relevancy now. You may build links from any source you want, but only the relevant ones will actually have a value on your search rankings.
Many people also say that getting links from bad websites may cause you to get penalized by Google, but I am not so sure about this. Obviously I don’t recommend, but I don’t think you need to worry so much. If Google would have penalized the one that has links from bad sites, I would start building links from bad neighbor to my competitor’s site. This would break the model.
Conclusion
Backlinks and content still represent the backbone of any SEO strategy, but I think we are starting to see some niche changes. First of all social media is being take more in consideration by search engines, so make sure your content can be easily shared. Second, +1s and shares on Google+ are particularly useful, so don’t neglect that.
