While we won’t claim to be psychic, as experts in Internet marketing, we necessarily make a point of staying on top of the trends in SEO. With things changing as rapidly as they do these days, the only way we can ensure our clients are staying ahead of the competition is to evolve and adapt every step of the way.

With that in mind, we’ve noticed that a lot of people are predicting where SEO is going from here. We’ve considered these predictions, weighed the strength and weaknesses of the arguments, and determined which ones seem most likely and are of most importance to small business owners. Here are a few we think will be valuable to you:

Guest posting will continue to help SEO:
Having guests post to your blog remains a great way to improve your SEO. However, just like everything these days, the quality of the content is the biggest determinant for whether Google will consider it beneficial or detrimental. Ensure that posts are relevant, original and useful to your visitors.

Google will keep tweaking its algorithms:
As we’ve covered in many previous editions, Google will keep coming after sites that use spun content or content that isn’t relevant to the site. This will continue (and possibly even increase) in 2013. Sites that don’t play ball will get punished in the rankings, so be sure your content is the best it can be.

Google+ will become a major factor this year:
We talked about Google+ at length in the first item, but it can’t be overstated: Plus is now the foundation for Google for many years to come. Despite its slow start as a social platform, it does have more than 100 million at present, and that’s expected to triple this year. Getting in line with Plus (which admittedly has its hurdles, as we noted) will be critical to your site’s SEO for years to come.

Sites that are optimized for Mobile SEO will prosper this year:
A growing number of people are using Facebook and similar platforms on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones, and that number is expected to skyrocket this year. If your site is optimized for PC users and not for mobile users, that will have a massively detrimental effect on your SEO. You absolutely cannot afford to ignore mobile users. At Ring Ring Marketing we know how to ensure our partners’ sites are optimized for this purpose.