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SEO Fundamentals in 2016

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SEO Fundamentals in 2016

If you are utilizing the same general SEO strategies and tactics that you did a year or more ago, it’s likely high time that you re-evaluate your strategies. Over the previous year alone, there have been some significant shifts in ranking factors within the search engines.

Here, we’ll discuss a few factors that will play a key role in SEO for 2016.

Keyword Research

Keyword research, at least fundamentally, hasn’t really changed much in the past couple of years or so. We still wish to figure out those words and phrases that our target market will use when seeking our products or services. There are a handful of ways we can achieve this:

The use of keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner and SEMrush for example, to find the most popular keywords and phrases that do not fall within the realms of the hyper-competitive.

The analyzing of your own website’s analytics as a way to learn which keywords generate traffic and sales. This is more difficult to achieve now, given Google’s limiting factors with respect to keyword analysis.

Assessing your competition’s ranking pages as a way to determine the keywords they are targeting.

Aiming to have a long-tail keyword focus while natural language search is becoming ever-more popular.

These strategies are nicely effective in finding keywords and various phrases that are relevant, but there’s a definite shift from the use of keywords and managing to gain high rankings in search.

Google, as is to be expected, is more sophisticated, and rather than singularly looking at search queries in terms of keywords, the queries that are made are analyzed more in terms of the intent of the end user. What does this signify to us when it comes to keyword research?

You should focus on relevant themes and topics that you can structure your choice of content around. Rather than working through a process of selecting a couple of words of phrases for which to write about, instead, you should use your findings to become more educated about the interests and needs of your audience.

On-Page SEO

Word count: Google is now showing a strong preference for more comprehensive and longer content. According to a 2015 Searchmetrics’ Ranking report, top-ranking content now has an average word count in the range of 1,150-1,300 words. In 2014, that was only around the 900 mark.

Relevant terms and proof: Relevant terms “prove” and support relevance to the main theme of the content. This in turn indicates to your readers and to Google that you cover the topic comprehensively.

Proof terms represent words and phrases that really ought to be used with respect to a particular topic. As an example, the word “search” will tend to be used extremely frequently when discussing SEO. On the other hand, relevant terms signify words that are frequently used in tandem with the primary keyword.

In the past, professionals in this trade utilized the term “LSI keywords,” or latent semantic indexing, which referred to these form of keywords. That is rarely the case these days, however.

Keywords within the content: It should be stated that keywords still should be incorporated in your content, particularly so in the title, the header, the sub headers, the introduction paragraph, and also the conclusion paragraph.

In accordance with the report by Searchmetrics, the top-ranking webpages enjoyed an increase in the number of keywords that were used within the text body.

Internal links: In high-ranking pages, ever since 2014, the number of internal links has increased. But this is not as important as the optimizing of the overall link structure. It matters less about the quantity of internal links, but rather, it does matter about the optimization of the structure internally as well as the page information. This way, both the user and the search engine are optimally guided throughout the content.

Use of header and meta-tags: Some 99 percent, in accordance to the Searchmetrics report, of the top 10 ranking webpages had a meta description. Eighty percent of those utilized an H1 tag. Though the meta description will likely not permit your content to rank higher, it works as a type of ad copy within the SERPs. So, as much as you can, be sure that your H1 tags together with the descriptions are accurate in their description of your page’s main topic and they are unique.

Learn about search optimization services that will ensure your web content rises to the top of the search engines.

I am the founder of Startup Today. I am the main writer and have put in many hours of work into creating this blog. If you want to find out more about me then lets get in contact.

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