What’s Important for SEO?

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30 Dec What’s Important for SEO?

Posted at 20:17h in Intermediate, SEO Tutorials by

 

Because of the constant innovation at major search engines, SEO changes frequently. Here are some of the biggest ranking factors for search engine rankings as we enter into 2017:

  1. Content Relevance and Quality: Search engines still want to match people with the most relevant results for what they are searching for. Search engines have become much smarter about context, which helps here. This means the days of “keyword stuffing” are long gone. Search engines can read past the keywords that some people may try to “stuff” into their webpages. Luckily, this means you should have the right people finding you as long as your site has great, relevant content!
  2. Responsiveness (mobile friendly) and Site Speed: If your site is not responsive (aka mobile friendly) at this point, and/or you have a very slow website, this will hurt you in search results. Google has now split their ranking algorithm into 2: one for desktop search and one for mobile searches. Naturally, having a responsive website is necessary for ranking well on the mobile search algorithm. With the constant increase in mobile traffic, having a responsive website is a must-have heading into 2017. Site speed is also a big factor that search engines pay attention to. If your site is loading in more than 4 seconds, Google knows that people may be too impatient to wait and will bounce quickly. Even if your site is slow and you do rank well, people are still likely to bounce quickly and visit a faster loading site.
  3. Incoming Links: Incoming links have become a bigger factor in recent years and are still very important. The more inbound links you can get from relevant, healthy websites, the better. Receiving incoming links from spam websites can hurt your website, though, so you can’t just jump on a website that promises to build incoming links for you and sign up. Link building can take time and strategy. One easy way to get healthy incoming links is to offer to guest blog for other relevant websites and include a link to your website in the post.
  4. Content Length: Google and other search engines like wordy websites. If your pages are lean on content, consider places that more (relevant, useful) words could be added throughout.
  5. Site Health & Security: As usual, website health is still very important. Malware and other issues will prevent you from performing well in search results. Site security is also becoming more important, and implementing an SSL is now very affordable and highly recommended. This is when your website has “https://” instead of simply “https://”. If you don’t have an SSL certificate, get in touch with us and we can help!

These are just a few of the current top ranking factors for organic search engine optimization. Things change pretty quickly in the SEO world, but these factors are here to stay, at least for the time being!