Search engine optimization is ‘the need of the hour.’ This is the reason why, for every business it has become a mandatory. SEO, is more important than ever, in today’s combative market. There are millions of users per day searching for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems. Search engines suffice them all. Through websites, blogs or online stores, SEO helps businesses grow and meet their objectives.
Search engine optimization or SEO, is a set of rules that can be followed by a website or blog owners to optimize their websites for search engines and in this way improve their search engine rankings.
Obtaining first page ranking in the search engines for your website & content, always entail a keen understanding of SEO guidelines & best practices. Over the last year the SEO landscape has changed drastically. To know them exactly and tackle them is the real key to be on top of the search.
Here are the 5 SEO ways to be top of the search engine ladder:
Mind the semantic search instead of keyword search
Keyword structure was a foundation of SEO strategy, till last year. Like, using numerous keyword tools you would find high-volume, low-competition keywords, and then include these keywords on your site in different ways. But this strategy will be no more as useful as before.
The reason is simple, introduction of Google’s Hummingbird update of 2013. Because of this now semantic search has overtaken keyword-based search. Google’s algorithms have become growingly sophisticated, assessing queries based more on user-intent and less on the specific keywords that are used.
That is why now business owners need to tend over optimizing their content for semantic search, by focusing on answering questions, especially asked by mobile users. Not just that, but to offer helpful supplementary information accompanied with your base content, information like reviews, maps, travel info, etc., by creating content providing all relevant info on a particular topic or theme, will include various thematic key- words instead of a few specific terms.
Value local SEO
Every business has its own, one of a kind, SEO strategy. Inspite of that local SEO optimization is still being underutilized by many businesses. Because if your site & content does not categorize in local search, you are missing out on a huge inundation of visitors.
Nowadays, most of the searches use mobile exclusively for product research. Most of the time products are searched while on the bus ride home or while waiting for a business meeting to start or on the way to the store, etc. Now, we find that Mobile technology is everywhere, and so businesses need to optimize for local search along with a mobile-first mentality, or they have to suffer a loss.
Work By Influential Bloggers & Care For Brand Advocates
The best used component of SMO till last year was requesting & acquiring links from a variety of sites, automated directories, article marketing, link exchanges, etc. By using these components, many organizations found desired first place in search engine ranking. Another technique used was keyword-rich anchor text for internal links.
Now, there is a huge shift in how Google treats & values links, so according to that sites have to change their strategies. The very important outcome of it is that if you want your site to be on top the first thing is to create amazing content and then support them with relationship-based strategies. These strategies include, acquaintance to influential bloggers, raising connections with brand advocates & engaging in social media.
Entice citations & mentions
Though link building sounds like a thing of the past, but it is still one of its kind to be useful. Now, we know that Google is placing more significance on implied links & brand mentions. So, even today, these traditional links are not at all outdated.These other non-hyperlinked mentions can also be an important part to be on top searched.
So what you should do for this? The answer is, you can just keep the mentions flowing, you can contribute high-quality guest posts on respected sites, syndicate your content, and actively share your content on social media and consistently produce very high-quality content on your own site and on other sites. It will automatically lead to organic inbound links and mentions.
Still Being Mobile-Friendly, Not Enough
Only depending on mobile-friendly, will no longer be useful. For that having a responsive site or mobile app is the minimum requirement. Now this year, designing and implementing a mobile-first content strategy will be a critical task for organizations.
But still there are ways to tackle this problem. First is, to go for short-form content rather than long-form, which is critical if you want to rank highly in the search engines. For mobile readers short-form content is often preferred.
Another way to be on top is to understand mobile users’ habits. Like, what content is accessed by them frequently, what activities they are performing, are they responsive about visual content or not, be focused on eye catching headlines & lead-ins, using mobile friendly formatting etc.
SEO can be demanding, but if you are able to practice all the needful things and have best strategy which is up to date, no doubt you will be on the top of the search engine ladder.
