It’s the day before Thanksgiving, November 27, 2013, and that’s got me thinking: as an SEO in 2013, what should we be thankful for? Well, I have come up with a list of things that every SEO should be thankful for this year. Certainly, these aren’t in any order of importance. They’re just things that I really think we, as SEOs in 2013, should be thankful for. Some are on my list “just because”, some are a complete joke (ha, ha), and others truly help me get my job done. If you’d like to add anything to the list, feel free to comment.
1. SaaS. Software As A Service. Truly, if we didn’t have the concept, we wouldn’t have services such as Majestic SEO, Link Research Tools, A Hrefs, Conductor, or a lot of the other SaaS tools that you and I use every day. And you can’t forget Moz.com and their toolset.
2. Links. If it weren’t for links, our SEO jobs would be different. Maybe we might even be media attention whores or we might actually be building content. Go figure.
3. Social Media Marketing. If it weren’t for social media marketing, the SEO industry would still have social media marketers doing SEO. Is it just me or in the past few years have the really bad SEOs become social media marketers?
4. Twitter. Yeah, I’m thankful for Twitter. I think every SEO should be. There is an amazing community of SEOs out there that hang out on Twitter; you should be a part of it. Oh yeah, and I honestly know believe that Tweets help rankings. More than they did before, not as much as they could, but more than they did before.
5. Google Plus. Don’t forget about G+. Authorship, Author Rank, and followers on Google Plus.
6. People like Alan Bleiweiss. If you don’t know what Alan has done for Dana, then you just don’t know. I am thankful for people in our industry who only wish they could be like Alan; and especially I know quite a few people who are very thankful for Alan.
7. Branding. Yes, I’m actually thankful for “branding” because if it weren’t for branding, we would still have all sorts of link spammers out there building thousands upon thousands of useless keyword rich anchor text links to sites. Getting links with your brand name counts more (finally). Hopefully this time next year we’ll be seeing less link spam.
8. https. Yeah, if we didn’t have https we wouldn’t have “not provided”.
9. Google Drive. Skydrive. Dropbox. Makes our lives so much easier when we can save all our files in he cloud and have access to the data from any device.
10. The cloud.
11. Email. Yeah, sending emails to get links removed wouldn’t be possible without email.
12. Really bad SEO firms. Cheap SEO firms. Without them, services like link audits and link cleanups wouldn’t be necessary. Sure they built really bad, cheap, automated links in the past few years. Now it’s people like me who are cleaning up all those links.
13. Link Disavow Tools. Bing was the first to offer it. Google followed. If you use the tool properly and disavow the right links, it will help with rankings and traffic.
14. Matt Cutts and Duane Forrester. The true kings of search. Without them, well, we would be without them. What again exactly is it that they do?
15. WordPress.
16. Yoast SEO.
17. Really bad web design. If it weren’t for those web designers who put multiple H1 tags on the same web page and others who just don’t know how to build a search engine friendly site, I wouldn’t have a job cleaning up client sites.
18. Article Spinning programs. Okay, well, no. I’m not thankful for them, but am thankful that they exist: so I can identify all those poorly written articles and get links cleaned up for clients.
19. SEMrush. Lots of good data that seems to be accurate most of the time. Great resource.
20. Internet radio, music, iTunes, Pandora, etc.. How do us SEOs keep ourselves entertained while working?
21. Writers. Not the overseas type, but good old fashioned writers who know how to write awesome content. If it weren’t for those great writers, us SEOs wouldn’t be in business.
22. Google. Yes, there I said it. We still rely on Google to bring our client sites traffic.
23. Bing.
24. Scroogled.
25. Archive.org. Without archive.org we wouldn’t be able to see what a site used to look like.
26. Blogger outreach. Yep, still use it to get good links and mentions.
27. Media outreach. Been using it for years, will still be the standard for doing SEO the “right way”.
28. Haro. Help a Reporter Out. Very useful, even though we cannot rely on it totally for SEO.
29. Blogging. Yeah, I still do it every day. Or at least try to do it every day. Add fresh new content to your site regularly and socialize it properly. Best SEO advice I can give to you right now. Or at least what I’m willing to give. 😉
Happy Thanksgiving.
