If you want to start 2013 with a bang you need to be up-to-date with how online marketing has evolved in the last 12 months.

In this article I’ll give you five quick tips to help you make an impact on the search engines in 2013.

Get blogging

There’s nothing new in this tip but thousands of small business owners in the UK still don’t have a regularly updated blog.

If you really want to engage more with potential customers and see your search engine rankings rise, it’s time to take content seriously.

Not everyone can write well. If you can’t, then pay a copywriter to do it for you. It will be a wise investment in 2013.

Get reading

Online marketing has undergone many changes in 2012 and you can be sure 2013 will be the same. Google is constantly updating its algorithm and if you don’t keep up to speed, you can easily get left behind.

Have a look for online marketing blogs people are mentioning on Twitter and pick out a few to read every week.

Review your hosting

The speed your site loads at has never been so important. In many cases cheap hosting results in slow loading times which in turn can harm your search engine rankings and visitor experience.

You can find out more about this and some tools to help you check your site speed on this post: does your website take too long to load?

Learn some social media skills

Social has made great strides in terms of its importance in online marketing in recent times and that’s only likely to increase in 2013.

Being able to use sites such as Twitter and Facebook effectively for your business is a must for 2013. Whether you like the idea of social media or not, it will pay to get some social media training or to teach yourself how to use it properly.

Focus on quality

Google’s algorithm updates in 2012 have seen a massive shift towards quality being rewarded in the search engine results. This means well written and interesting content, incoming links to your site from other high quality authority websites and other things such as quick and reliable hosting as mentioned above.

There are no shortcuts to good online marketing. 2013 is the year to focus on quality in every online activity you do.

If you’ve got any questions or would like to share a tip of your own, please comment below.

Image credit: pppspics (license) 

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2012 at 8:59 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.