SEO is a challenge that is always ongoing. The search engines, especially Google, tinker with, and alter, search parameters almost daily with no apparent reason seemingly detected. As soon as companies build themselves a solid SEO plan, Google decides to fix something that isn’t broken. As this new year progresses, here are just a few strategies that will help you to stay on top of the rankings game.
- Believe it or not, keyword and long tail research is still critical to your long term SEO success. It comes down to successful and helpful engaging content as well as a new strategy called micro-focusing. This is a strategy by which companies narrow their search focus as finely as possible. Gone are the days when you can just broad brush your SEO and throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.
- Back to content. Quality will always rank better than quantity. That is a given as well as not resorting to keyword stuffing. Yes, believe it or not, companies still deploy this black hat tactic from the early days. Then they wonder why search god Google sends a penalty their way.
- Two of the most important ranking factors that few businesses give any attention to are being mobile ready and page load speeds. The search engines keep a sharp eye on load times and it also matters to your visitors as well as your bottom line. Take longer than three seconds and your visitors will be clicking off to your competitors. More than 60 percent of all searches these days are being done on a phone or a tablet. If someone clicks to your site and all they see is a giant knuckle, then you will not be taken seriously and, of course, once again, you have chased off a potential sale.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer