Did you knowBest SEO practices and trends for 2016
Volatile is the word that can describe the SEO industry the best, as there is a new breakthrough making us reanalyze our priorities each month. Let’s see what we should expect in 2016:
Keyword research
Keyword research didn’t change much since last year; since it still refers to discovering words and appropriate phrasing for promoting businesses and products.
There are many efficient strategies to achieve this:
– There are many keyword research tools you can use to pick up the most popular and not that hyper-competitive phrases: Ubersuggest, Keyword Planner, Searchmetrics, SEMrush, and so on.
– Going deeper into your website analytics to distinguish those keywords that are already driving traffic and helping you close sales. Thanks to this data, you can think of other related keywords, or build more content that contains those terms.
– Analyzing competitors’ highest ranked pages to select the keywords they’ve targeted for your own website.
– Choosing long-tail keywords, as those are the most popular and naturally persuasive ones.
One thing is definitely true: Google is growing in sophistication and has started analyzing keywords from the prism of user intent, which is why you should always look for the most relevant themes and topics to structure content around them. For instance, let go of the old good habit of selecting one phrase and writing about it, and think of what the audience would really like to read.
On-page SEO
As relevant reports indicate, the average word count when it comes to content should be somewhere between 1,140 and 1,285 words. It is because writers are required to comprehensively cover the topic they’re discussing, rather than scratching the surface with technicalities everybody knows.
Relevant terms: These terms will support your content, proving that it is indeed relevant to the topic you’ve mentioned. Therefore, relevant terms are your best bet to signalize to Google that you’re delivering quality, and deserve to be ranked well.
Relevant terms can also be proof words/phrases, and such must be present when optimizing content for SEO purposes. In all other cases, they are used together with the primary keywords in order to cover the topics, as ‘Google’ does, when talking about ‘Panda’, ‘SEO’, ‘ranking’, and so on.
Keywords through the content: Keywords are not only meant to be included in titles, and you can safely use them in subtitles, introductory paragraphs, or even conclusive ones.
Internal links, on the other hand, refer to the total sum of links to be found within the content and are less important than the optimization of your entire linking structure.
Meta tags and headers: If you take a look at some of the most popular websites, you will see that almost all of them include a meta description and an H1 tag. The meta description is important for content ranking, as it is a kind of ‘ad copy’ which appears in the searching results, while H1 tags are much more unique and descriptive, and help everybody understand you’re your content is about.
Mobile optimization: While mobile optimization was almost of no importance in the past, today it is a vital ranking factor which can make or break all of your SEO efforts. You have to make sure your design is mobile responsive or to create a separate mobile app for the purpose.
Loading times are also very important since the highest ranked websites are those that load quickly regardless of the devices used to open them. In fact, mobile leading times are currently the most important ones to focus on.
An appropriate structure for you content: Content must be organized in a logical way, and that’s important both for search engines and users.
Mobile SEO
Just recently, Google confirmed what we all suspected: mobile search has finally taken over the traditional one, which means that every website which alienates users with the lack of mobile-friendly content will be taken from the scene.
There are many priorities to be considered here: users are accessing the internet on the go, which is why you should present them content structured in a way which they can understand. Short posts with bulleted lists, the same as sharp contrasts and large fonts can be really useful for the purpose.
Then, if your mobile-optimized website has ads to display, remember that you must include fewer than the ones on the desktop version, as that’s the only way to keep loading times low.
Building links
Building links and exchanging them with webmasters is an old school trick that seems to seize in 2016. You habit to create links, submit those manually to web directories; post other links on Web 2.0 articles where there is no editorial review, or spamming on forums is simply no longer accepted.
Taking experienced businessmen as an example, you’d see that building links won’t do the SEO magic for your website, and what is worse – it can cause Google to rank you lower or to penalize the site.
Still, you can make use of the so-called implied links, which are in fact citations and non-linked mentions taken into account by ranking algorithms and can therefore make your website more valuable in the SEO sense of the word.
That’s why we recommend you to stay aside from building links and pay more attention to the quality of your content instead.
Guest blogging is another good strategy you can use to inbound content and which also helps with targeting new audiences.
What is extremely popular and effective is creating a buzz about your content on social media, and sending the so-called social signals by sharing content on multiple platforms.
The more your content is read, liked, shared, or mentioned, the more people will visit your website and read your posts. Still, you have to remember that Google doesn’t consider Facebook/Twitter likes and shares to be as effective as links.
Use videos. As a user, yourself, you know videos engage the audience in a more powerful way, and unless you incorporate it into your modern marketing strategy, you’ll find yourself falling behind competitors.
Social and website content is about to be united, since social media is receiving more real estate on each SERP, and is, therefore, becoming equally important as website content.
For you, this means being able to get higher ranking for social posts based just on the keywords you’ve used, and gaining indexability for more than one platform.
Body copy
The way on-page SEO is right now, the critical ranking factor is first and foremost content. At the end of the day, it is content what people are looking for on your website and the only way your brand can provide value for them.
Knowing this, you should try your best to make content more valuable and unique, and to relate it to what they may be searching for.
First of all, you have to find the most appropriate and long-tail keywords to use, and to think of answers for them. The algorithms of our time are perfectly able to understand when you’re using keywords purposefully, and when you’re simply stuffing them to make the post count, and that’s exactly what they’re going to indicate to users when determining whether your site is relevant and worth of visiting.
Appropriate titles for your pages
The body copy is the reason visitors come and stay on your website, but for the purpose, you have to assist them to find what they are looking for.
The ideal tool for that is page titles, being the essential components inventing user decisions, and inspiring them to click on your site when displayed on the SERP. Crawlers will also appreciate page titles in order to determine how relevant your website is for the search query where it qualifies.
Page descriptions
The same as page titles, descriptions (called also meta descriptions) are among the most important factors to help your website appear in the SERP and rank higher than the others.
Headlines
It is perfectly fine to add headlines other than your page title and to include them in the text body (usually denoted as H1-H6). This is another procedure the crawlers use to differentiate your keywords and to highlight them.
Imagery
You may not really expect it in 2016, but imagery still plays the role of an important SEO asset, which websites often neglect and under-utilize. 2016 made searches much more visual and is trying even harder to deliver amazing and brand-related visual content while the visitor is deciding which website to open. This can either be the drawback or the one-time opportunity for your website to become more popular, so make sure you optimize images with keyword text.
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