It’s time to plan your SEO strategy for 2018. SEO is the best way to ensure that your marketing efforts dominate the search engine result pages. If you want to build your online business, then you have to concentrate on SEO as it will give you high quality and unpaid traffic to your website. Let’s dive into our SEO tutorial and see what’s next.
Build Your Website for Your Users, not for Spiders!
Nowadays, paying for backlinks, hiding contents, black hat practices or keyword stuffing will do nothing but hurt your website.
Everyone wants a site that is easily visible and usable. SEO builds a bridge allowing 3 business parties to communicate in the modern business environment:
- Consumer
- Provider and
- Search Engine
In 2018, SEO will make a relationship among the three nodes of the business graph. Google will also focus on mobile search optimization. This year you have to ensure that every business that you have has an amazing mobile friendly version that is fully SEO optimized. You will also have to make sure that great user experience is one of your 2018 goals.
SEO Trends 2018 Best Practices
Where should you start? First of all, consider the goals of all Search Engine sites. If you want to keep your visitors coming back, then you have to understand what Google, Yahoo, Bing or other search engines want to display. The aim of the search engines is to help people find the highest-quality results for the given search query.
Plan your SEO strategy. Consider the following 2 key points:
- Fill up your site with the high quality content. Keywords need to be relevant to your website.
- Make sure that search engines are aware of the fact that number 1 key point is absolutely TRUE.
Content is Still KING
Only high quality content will help you fulfill your goal. It just a matter of minutes to create a website. You can easily fill it with existing contents by using crawler bots, aggregators and copy scrapers. But what would be the end product?
Quality content is the key to reach your audience. What makes high-quality content? According to the latest SEO trends, search engines are now implementing smarter ways to define what is high quality website content. Here are some clear quality guidelines provided by Google that you can use as a framework to create your own content.
- Write page content with your audience in mind.
- Have useful, user friendly and informative content.
- Always keep up to date copy and make sure your content is long lasting.
- Follow content marketing strategies to make your articles popular among readers.
Quality content resources are reflected in the engagement metrics. Engagement metrics are the combination of session length and bounce rate. It allows search engines to determine how happy visitors are with the content. If you offer differentiated and substantial value, your metrics will reflect that. Content marketing has the power to generate 60% more traffics than traditional marketing. You will get 3 times more leads if you can guesstimate the right action to take.
Mobile Friendly and Fast Site
Faster sites often mean the best user experience possible. You may write user friendly content, maintain keywords and other on- or off-page SEO factors, but what if your target audiences fails to access your site? Mobile devices are being used more and more every day. If your website is not mobile-friendly, then you will lose over half of your potential customers. Your website design concept is also considered a trend in 2018.
Some recent studies have shown that faster sites get more visitors than slower sites. More than 46 percent of people expect a website to load in less than two seconds! Just a one second delay in a web page’s loading time can result in a decline in sales.
- Fast Site: Google factors in site speed into the rankings of search results. If your site is mobile friendly and fast, it will be more visible. You can use tools that will crawl your site and effectively flag the slowest pages to ensure the performance of your site is fully optimized.
- Fully Responsive: Search engines give preference to sites that are fully responsive. More than one third of clicks to sites come with organic result. This year organic search will get priority. You need to make sure that your sites render well on smart phones and tablets to maximize the traffic from mobile searches.
- Freshness: This is also an important factor. Sites that have not been updated in weeks, months or even years are likely to have lower quality. Outdated articles mean that the site does not have any inbound links. Sites that are updated regularly will pass the “Freshness” test. Google and all other search engines like websites that come with newer and current content.
Citations and Brand Mentions Will Get Priority
Citations and Brand mentions will get just as much importance as link building in 2018. Google and other search engines are starting to differentiate between:
- Implied links (known as no-follow links), and
- Express links
Express links are links that we generally come to think of as “links”. These are the URLs that actually lead back to a website or webpage like http://www.yahoo.com. On the other hand, implied links can include mentioning or referencing a website or a brand but without linking to any site.
Due to the abuse and misuse of link building as a part of negative SEO and other deceptive schemes, Google is giving higher importance to citations and brand mentions. These are less likely to be used for SEO purposes and are not easily manipulated to achieve higher rankings.
After the latest SEO updates in 2017, more businesses will track and measure brand mentions and also no-follow links. These are becoming very important – similarly to the do-follow links for higher search rankings.
Implied links are becoming more relevant to the brand authority in new ways. It is calling the system of entire link building into question. Implied links demonstrate the breakthrough in Google’s sophisticate measurement of authority.
Google is also giving importance on reference queries. They help to build a level of understanding of the popularity of a site. Similar results are compared for any given query. The better your sites are at serving visitors with what they are looking for, the better they will rank higher in relevant searches. It is best to provide as much information as you can to your readers on a single topic using multiple posts!
Brand mentions are getting popularity to a site’s authority, however, do not consider traditional links as obsolete. Express links and also implied links, are both used to calculate site’s authority. In 2018, you should include both of them in your link building strategy.
Social Signals will Get More Value
Google+ Authorship was known as a popular way to promote a site or even content. But in August 2014, Google finally announced that they ended their Google+ Authorship program due to very low adoption rates. They mentioned that it was not very useful for the users.
Social Signals are used by Google in its ranking algorithm. In 2017, Google paid attention to social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to justify the engagement of the customers with the sites.
Large amounts of content entries are produced and published every day. However, only writing articles and other types of publications is not be enough to achieve the SEO goals for your website. Marketers and business owners have realized that all the businesses that have the ability to humanize the brand are the ones standing out.
Bad SEO Will Be a BIG Threat
In short, bad SEO is when dubious people and brands start to build thousands of links that are nothing but spam. These links are directed at the websites of the competitors. Bad SEO is used to decrease the search engine rankings of the competitor’s website. It is a big problem, especially for the webmasters over the past few years.
2018 SEO Checklist
Although search engines like Google or Yahoo are smarter than you think, that does not mean that they do not need any help. It is your responsibility to make it easier for the search engines to find your website. You have to help them understand the content of your website. The 2018 SEO checklist will help you to understand the areas you should give priority to and the ones that you should ignore.
#Number 1: Meta Tag Checklist for SEO
This is a type of an on page optimization. Proper Meta tag implementation will not only enhance your keywords but will better your ranking in SERP also. Meta tags can be divided into two types – one is Meta keywords and the other is known as meta descriptions tags. Meta keyword tags are not really in fashion since Google ditched them. However, Meta description still plays an important role in the overall SEO of a website. Meta description tags can be used for keywords.
Meta tags are nothing but snippets of text. They describe the idea of an article. But Meta tags do not appear on the pages automatically. You have to insert them in the Head section of the HTML document. Meta tags tell the search engines what your page is all about. Take a look at the meta tags checklist for 2018:
#Number 2: On-Page Tags Checklist for SEO
On-page tags are very important if you want to help search engines to notice your website and rank it properly. Google uses on page tags to gain insight into a web page, as well as ownership and the relationship to the published pages. On-page tags are used by Google to test any duplicate texts that may exist. And most importantly, these elements are used to determine the quality of your website as a part of the ranking algorithm. These determine whether your website is helpful and provides the information that your users are searching for.
#Number 3: Keywords Checklist for SEO
Keywords play an important role in optimizing your sites for search engines. Organic indexing depends on the right choice of keywords. It also helps the content development strategy. Although, you have to be very careful as keyword stuffing can easily result in penalties, whereas targeting the right ones can help you promote your site(s). Using keywords can help you bring traffic to your site with high conversion rates. If you maintain a natural and non-spammy tone throughout your webpages, you will surely benefit.
#Number 4: Page Content Checklist for SEO
Page content allows search engines to determine how happy visitors are with the resources available on your website. If you offer differentiated and substantial value, you metrics will indicate that using the growing number of users. Content marketing has the power to generate more traffic than traditional marketing. Only high quality content can help you to fulfill your goal.
It can take just a matter of minutes to create a website. You can easily fill it in with existing online copy by using bots, or aggregators, but these will not rank you any better. Google is aware of duplicated content and there are penalties if you build a scraper.
#Number 5: Site Links Checklist for SEO
Internal links are very useful for establishing the total architecture of a site. For this reason, link building always get priority. Search engines like Google need to crawl the page in order to list the sitemap of pages into their massive keyword-based indices. Crawlable link structure and navigation is also important to help search engines find your site easily. A SEO friendly structure lets spiders browse effectively all the pathways of your website.
Bottom Line: SEO trends will dominate in 2018. Plan your strategy now so that your website will in shine in the future.