For many people, SEO is just about submitting links to the search engine directory, building backlinks & having a sitemap. We never tend to exceed this because it never concerned us. But the upcoming year, 2018 has many in store for the technological revolution. It expects us to change the way we look at SEO & treat SEO. Here we will see the latest SEO strategies for on page & off page optimization that should be adopted for what’s to come.
On page optimization consists of all techniques that are concerned with the pages of the website & off page optimization consists of all techniques that are concerned with external links. But, the purpose remains the same for both the practices, to achieve higher ranks in the Search Engine Results (SERPs).
Before you completely understand, what it takes to rank high on Google’s SERPs, you need to educate yourself about what has changed & what needs to be improved. This would make clear what Google’s intentions are for 2018, besides its core goal of bringing the most relevant search results in the fastest way possible. Google has been trying to reach the peak of perfection. It has, thereby, eliminated all other search engines from the race. Besides this, it has become a household name along the way.
SEO is the mind of Google & it is very significant to read its mind. There are two ways how Google’s mind works:
On-Page Upcoming Practices
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): Most of the online traffic comes from mobile devices, it is the fact & Google has incorporated the valuation of AMP feature in SERPs. AMP is an open source initiative by Google to allow fast rendering & loading of content on mobile devices. Google AMP is becoming amusingly popular as more than 80% of global online audience accesses the internet through mobile devices & so the SEO experts should keep an eye on the AMP test results for the pages of the websites they look after.
Updated Content: Google measures all of your contents for freshness & then scores them according to the type of search query. The website should be updated from time to time, by creating a more useful content on accessible pages, removing unnecessary advertisements & creating new pages that can answer fresh search queries. As an SEO expert, you should focus on having an entirely new freshness quotient for your website that ranks it up in the SERPs.
Rich Answer Optimization: Every day, billions of searches performed on Google & only 19.45% appear in the rich answer snippets. The percentage may not be as high today, but in the future, it would also become competitive as it directly attracts user’s attention. Since Google has made its intention of giving value to rich answers, because they deliver the most relevant information to the search query without requiring clicking on the website URL, SEO experts should optimize the website content for rich answers of relevant search queries.
Quick Page Loading: Earlier in 2017, Google formally announced that page speed will be a ranking factor in its mobile-first index & now it is quite evident that 2018 will favor websites that are fast & accessible. This can be achieved by enabling compression, minifying CSS, JavaScript & HTML, reducing redirects & optimizing images. Google’s Page speed test can be a helpful tool for SEO experts to keep a check on this in the coming year.
Off-Page Optimization:
All the practices come under the umbrella of off page optimization that concerns the relationship of your website with other websites. It includes link building, but it is not restricted to link building. The off-page optimization practices for 2018 are a level up, targeting more actions & traffic to your website.
Off-Page Upcoming Practices
Content Marketing: This is a small thing that has the capability to bring out big changes. After having produced high-quality content on your websites, 2018 will bring in the need to market the content on highly-trafficked destinations of the web such as Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, Google+ & Pinterest, besides Instagram, Twitter, Facebook & YouTube. It is one of the most important & effective SEO practices to be put to utilize this year. It would engage many people with your website & take you up in SERPs.
Quality Backlinks: There is no doubt that Google measures the number of backlinks to your content & views them as the number of votes received in an election, but it values them more if they have quality added to them. In other words, if the backlinks give the visitors what they are looking for while they land your website, it will make a difference to your ranking in SERPs. As an SEO expert, you not only need to bring more links to your domain but also need to earn them from authoritative & trustworthy websites.
Client Testimonials & Product Reviews: Since Google has shifted its working to machine learning, it reaches out to unique reviews about products & services, as a measure of a good brand, hence a good website. It is surely going to play a big role in the coming days as it reflects that trust users have on your website & certainly, pull up the rankings in SERPs.
Security is Priority: In the coming year, https (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) will be a ranking factor. Websites that use https over http will have an added benefit in the SERPs, as it will keep the information safe from hackers. Google has although not announced it officially, but the search engines prefer secure websites. As a good SEO practice, all websites should switch from http to https, otherwise, the coming year might bring in penalties.
Conclusion
SEO is like a puzzle – the more you try to solve it, the more you get lost in it. You have a checklist of your primary SEO practices for the coming year but you have to keep educating yourself about the changes that take place.
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