If you want lots of people to read your content, it has to rank well in search engines. The best way to do that is by following these top Search Engine Optimization tips for 2018. With this guide, you’ll learn tips for every area relevant to ranking well in 2018. SEO should be core to your small business marketing tactics if you want to be relevant in the future.
As we move forward, keep in mind that SEO works for all search engines: Google, Bing, and anything else you happen to use. While all search engines have a different algorithm, they’re all trying to find and display the most relevant content to a searcher. With these tips, you can encourage all search engines to see your content as much more relevant than anyone who ignores these best practices and new tactics.
Before we continue, let’s talk about the basics: The SEO that you practice on every page is called on-page SEO and everything that happens off of your website is then termed off-page SEO. On-page is where everything starts. Even if you have the best link building strategy in the world, if your on-page content doesn’t let the search engine know precisely what’s there, it still won’t rank for what you need it to.
On that note, the following four headings will break down each of the critical on-page SEO factors that you need to pay attention to in 2018. Then, the fifth category, Links & Social will break down how these factors can enhance what you’ve built up.
Targeting
This is where you define what your keywords are, who you want to attract to your website, and what you can do for them. Every piece of content you produce will need to have some SEO plan. This could even just be a part of your websites general style guidelines, but you need to make sure to write it up and have it in mind while creating your content.
For essential blog posts, for instance, you will need to define the words and terms you want to include as well as general keyword density and word count. While you might hear a lot about keyword density and how vital it is, it’s not as strict as you might think. As long as you’re not intentionally putting your keyword or phrase in every line, you’re probably doing fine (and there are plenty of plugins that can keep an eye on density for you.)
Additionally, your keywords should show up in your titles and headings as well as the MetaData and have a higher density in the first paragraph or section of a post. This makes certain that both your audience and the search engine knows exactly what to expect.
There’s no need to force content to be a specific length, but if it’s too short, you may want to try to go into more detail and include additional examples. These are two ways to create more extended content that increases comprehension of a topic rather than adds irrelevant information or empty words.
Content
The state of your on-page and overall site content is the single most critical factor and also the most contested. This section is further broken up into two parts: consumable material and website specifics. The first part will detail what the real meat of your website, the posts, pages, and other readable and consumable information must have for SEO purposes. The latter part will discuss the few critical pieces of frequently ignored “content” on the more administrative side of things- meta tags, URLs, and alt text, etc.
- Consumable Content
Consumable content is everything from blog posts to static pages. It is also videos to infographics. With consumable material, more is always better. This means longer posts (of all media types) and more frequent posts will help you rank better and faster for a variety of terms(as long as they remain high quality.) Having more skin in the game gives you a more significant boost, no matter how long each piece of content is.
However, if you can only create a few pieces of content now and then, make them longer and with layers of depth. Consider adding multimedia, too. By creating your videos and infographics, you get 3x as many chances to rank on a variety of additional platforms.
- Meta Content and Site Specifics
Meta content and site specifics are things that need to be routinely added to each piece of content (though some CMS systems may be able to generate most of this automatically.) For everything, you’ll need:
Alt-Text – This is the text that is displayed when an image is not available for any reason. It may also be read by software used to assist those with vision impairment. Depending on how your website is set up, it may show when the cursor is held over an image.
Readable URLs – Every one of the URLs on or about your website should display in understandable language, usually showing the title of a post or other relevant information. Do not let it default to a string of numbers.
MetaData and Descriptions – This data may be generated automatically but creating it yourself can help improve the amount of traffic you get. The meta title and description of a page are typically what shows up in the search result for that page.
Speed
Above all, speed may be the most overlooked website design factor of new webmasters, business owners, and entrepreneurs. If your page loads slowly, it’s hurting your digital reputation in more than one way.
First, Google has standards for how quickly a page should load. They even offer a free page speed tool that breaks down if your website fits this spec (or possible reasons why it’s failing.) The reason Google has a speed standard is that they know that most of their searchers won’t wait for that page to load.
People have relatively short attention spans. They want the page they have clicked the link to, to load immediately. If it doesn’t, they’re going to click the back button and try another. You have three seconds to impress them, don’t let your load time ruin your chances. So, if your page is showing a given search engine that it can’t load up completely within 5 seconds, you need to work on that first.
If your page is slow, not only will a search engine flag it for that slow load rate, but it will take into account your bounce rate. If you are unfamiliar with bounce rate, this is the rate at which people leave your website within the first few seconds of visiting it. If too many people click away right after clicking a link to your website, it gets flagged as low quality no matter the reason people were clicking away. From there your search rank drops as the search engines see no reason to send more people to a website that they don’t want to go to, even if your other scores are high.
To avoid both of these problems and to meet your visitor’s expectations, you need to have an acceptable load speed. Using the tool mentioned above, it should be easy to see where your problem areas are. For most people, you need to optimize your images. You can do this in a number of ways. The easiest is to use Photoshop’s “export for web” feature and re-upload each image.
If you use WordPress or another CMS platform, there should also be a handful of optimization and caching plugins. However, many of these are less efficient than the Photoshop approach. However, if you are already using small image files, you should be in good shape.
Mobile First
If you’ve looked into SEO much at all, you’ve probably come across the term “mobile-first.” This is a new tack that Google announced they would be taking starting this year. Moving forward, they will prioritize websites that meet a number of criteria that suits mobile devices in addition to desktops. They aren’t abandoning desktop display, but they are looking for websites that meet current web standards and can adapt to a wide variety of screen sizes.
In short, your website needs to be adaptable to compete. Right now, that adaptability could even give you a slight edge as other businesses, and your competitors are still adapting to this new tack.
In addition to responsive web design, you’ll need to think about how this will affect the content you have published and planned to publish. If you rely on mobile a lot yourself, pay attention to the things you appreciate as well as what annoys you about certain websites.
Mobile-optimized content, for an audience rather than a search engine, is usually a bit sparse due to the size of the screen. There is more “white space” to make things easier to read and keep track of. Scrolling is endless, with more content being shifted down. Links to other pages on your site can be helpful, especially in content, but resource links may be fewer as navigating between pages can be more difficult.
In any case, mobile-first shouldn’t change much for any website that’s already adjusted to a responsive approach. Beyond that, all you need to do is test your website on your own devices and make sure it looks good. If it seems a little off or hard to read, make adjustments as you would to any other part of your website.
Links and Social
There are two main types of links: internal and external. Internal links go from one post to another post or page within your website. These links help your audience find related content right away and extend the amount of time they spend on your website. Linking in helps create a secure network between your pieces of content.
External links are links that take people away from your website. They can come in a variety of flavors. You might have reference links, affiliate links, or link out to things that you want to share. Other than directing people away from your website (or a spam website, but you wouldn’t do that, right?), there is no harm in linking out.
When someone links to your website, that is also an external link. These are the kind of external links that make the difference. Links that are placed on other websites make it easier for people to find your project. They also boost your website’s “authority.” How much of a boost you get depends on how powerful the website is that linked to you. The higher your authority, the more likely you are to rank higher in a search.
Building those links can be done in a number of ways. In 2018, much of your link building strategy may be focused in two main areas: multimedia and social media. Multimedia in this sense is mostly about video. Posting videos and being featured in them, accompanied by links to your website or business pages, are a great way to boost SEO (as an alternative to text-based guest posts.)
You can also send out links to your social communities (or automate the process to do so when you publish). Though these links tend to fade out over time, they could give you a nice boost and help you build your social following at the same time. Also, most social media sites allow you to include a multimedia image, such as a short video or infographic in these updates. This, combines with your link, will produce more results than a text-only update (and may have greater staying power.)
Conclusion
SEO will not stop progressing. For years to come, you will need to stay on top of the latest trends in SEO. And, to make matters even more complicated, as things evolve the challenge will lie in the subtle changes that you need to make for your website.
Google, along with the other popular search engines will never release their the changes they make in their algorithms, so it is up to you to pay close attention to new trends with regard to SEO.
So, regardless of the type of business you run, you need to be able to quickly identify new trends and prepare your websites to fit any changes that search engines are making. The bottle line is that it will keep you ahead of your competition. Just remember, if you want to rank high, you need to keep a close on on what’s going on with SEO best practice.
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