Five Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques Needed for 2018

August 2, 2018 – Today’s guest blogger is Jean Jennings, content manager for Serpbook, an online platform designed to provide information about monitoring, automating and reporting on keywords. Serpbook also provides local and global rankings related to search engine results in real time on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. 

For those of you unfamiliar with search engine optimization, known as SEO in the Internet world, it is a method used to increase traffic to a website through search engines such as Google. SEO is designed to make sure that the right web user visits a website, someone interested in what is posted there. It also is designed to increase the traffic to the site from search users clicking on the listing on results pages. 

In her posting today, Jennings describes how the use of SEO is changing as the Internet and search engines evolve. I hope you find her contribution informative and welcome your comments.

SEO today is not the same as it was when it started in the 1990s, not to suggest that there are still some basics that website developers need to apply. The tactics, however, are changing and they keep getting restructured every other day.

What that means for website developers is the need to refine SEO strategies in an ongoing fashion to realize the goal of improving rankings on sites like Serpbook. With this in mind here are some suggested SEO techniques website developers can employ in 2018.

1. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

The world is going mobile. Reports from Google official statements show that almost 60% of searches today originate on mobile devices. It is for this particular reason that you need to AMP your website.

What is AMP?

The acronym stands for accelerated mobile pages and refers to open source software aimed at making pages load quickly to mobile devices. Since so many of the people who will be visiting your site will do it via a mobile device, AMP will make the user experience much better because your pages will load quickly. It is generally known that if a page takes more than 4 seconds to load you will lose that potential customer. So amping up your website makes sense.

2. Create quality and creative content

Content is critical to a successful SEO strategy. To keep users interested you need to provide new methods of presentation of content from page redesign to refreshing old content to make it more engaging and attention-grabbing. The prime rule is to make content relevant to a site visitor. Adding images, video, and even providing some humor within a site can entice a larger audience.

3. Internal links are crucial

Make use of internal links to increase the effectiveness of your SEO results. That means connecting the content within your website to newly created content. This gives the site a good architecture which plays a significant role in reducing bounce rates.

What are bounce rates? This refers to the number of visitors who come to your site, view one page, and then leave. A high bounce rate affects site rankings. Do the internal links right and that visitor will click on other pages at your site. The end result will be improved site rankings.

4. Use relevant keywords

If you are not familiar with the term keywords then you are probably a true novice to website building. So what are they? These are words and phrases that define the content of your site and are critical to SEO.

The challenge of doing keywords right is not to use too many. If you stuff your site with lots of keywords it can do more harm than good. Search engines can penalize a website with too many keywords effectively ignoring it in results and rankings. Highly targeted keywords, on the other hand, earn you increased organic traffic, which is good for site rankings.

A good tool to employ is a keyword planner that can help you source various keywords to further optimize your site.

5. You can now use longer Meta tags/Meta descriptions

Meta tags are content descriptions in the form of phrases that include critical keywords. In the past, these descriptors on Google were limited to 160 words. But Google has now doubled the number of words that can be placed in a meta description of a site.

The key to remember is the meta description is not displayed but hidden in the code that search engines read. It, therefore, provides a critical first impression of the site. As such it should be spell checked, error-free, catchy, and contain the most relevant keywords.

A final word, the advice given here today is about the current state of SEO. You should remember that these rules keep changing, which means you need to be on top of them to track anything new that can give a site a better chance of being found through search engine queries.