Many of you are motivated to keep your website error-free for SEO reasons (hey, any motivation is a good motivation when it comes to clean websites!). And we all know that, although Bing is making a pretty good effort, Google is still the driver in SEO.

SEOmoz recently published an article outlining their predictions for where Google is heading in 2013. Here’s a summary.

1. Increased Connection to Its Mission — Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” As Google further develops its algorithm, its mission is the guiding principle that leads that development.
2. Increased Weight of Semantic — The fact that Google offers the opportunity to verify accuracy of rich snippets implementation (and is continuously updating the tool), changed its name to the Structured Data testing tool, and recently offered the opportunity to highlight events structured data directly from Webmaster Tools, all lead to the conclusion that that semantic is going to have even greater weight in how Google will organize the information it crawls.
3. Inclusion of AuthorRank and PublisherRank — You’ve heard about AuthorRank, and although it hasn’t been fully implemented, it’s pretty clear where Google is taking it. An aspect of AuthorRank which isn’t receiving as much attention yet is PublisherRank: the rel=”publisher” mark up. It is rel=”publisher” that connects a site (the publisher) with the authors. Even when those same authors abandon the publisher to start working with another site, their AuthorRank will continue to influence the “PublisherRank,” which makes it even stronger.
4. Development of Google+ — When Google+ first came out, we all thought it was just another not-so-great social media platform. But Google is demonstrating that it’s much more than that, and it continues to improve the platform. Google+ appears to be the evolution of Google for a number of reasons:
   1. Social is the nature of a profiler tool.
   2. The fact that rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” are strictly related to Google profiles makes them part of the future of Google Search (and also Paid Search).
   3. It is the easiest way for Google to obtain real social signals, not just through how users act on Google+, but also through users connecting many other social accounts to the their G+ profile.
5. Increased Importance of Mobile-Friendliness — More people are using the internet on their mobile devices. Google demonstrated that it fully understands this when it bought Android Inc. in 2005 and entered in the mobile phone industry in 2008.
6. Usefulness is Essential — Panda, Penguin, EMD, and Layout Update all were aimed at prioritizing the most useful sites available, and punishing those that Google considered useless. 2013 will see definitive adoption of content marketing into SEO, and those sites that do not integrate marketable content into their strategies will see themselves overtaken in the SERP. Quality, valuable content is king!

As the SEO discipline develops, rewarding sites that should be rewarded, we’re in for an exciting time! Let EvolvingSites help you keep your site error-freeas you focus on these newest developments from Google!