5 Things You Should Know About SEO in 2017

5 Things You Should Know About SEO in 2017 If you’re working on those organic rankings, here are 5 tips to help you run an seo audit and make sure that you’re following the best practices for SEO in 2017.

If you run your own business website, it’s important to understand the changing face of SEO. The SEO basics of two or three years ago, aren’t necessarily safe or effective today, so take a few minutes to go through these five tips and make sure that your site meets the current best practices.

Shoddy SEO Can Kill Your Site

Links have long been the lifeblood of the internet and the quality of those links is crucial. The crew at Google constantly find new ways to identify web spam, and if you’ve had low quality links built for your site that disregarded search engine guidelines, you could see your site sink, never to return.

It’s no exaggeration to say that you should put a link audit at the top of your to-do-list this year. This isn’t something you should attempt to do yourself or hand off to an assistant or intern. A link audit is best left to an SEO expert. It will identify harmful backlinks and allow you to disavow them before they cause any damage.

Mobile Matters More Than Ever

Figures from Ofcom at the end of 2016 show that internet users in the US spent an average of 87 hours per month browsing the web on their smartphone compared to 34 hours spent on desktops. In the UK, browsing on smartphones averages 66 hours per month.

If your site isn’t mobile friendly, you’ll be penalised by the search engines and ignored by your potential customers. The major search engines favour mobile-friendly sites over ones designed for desktop browsers, and a non-mobile friendly site will drive visitors away and hurt your rankings.

Content Is Still King

Whether your visitors arrive via search, advertising or social media, your content must give them what they’re looking for. Make sure it’s well laid out, easy to scan, simple to understand and written to convert.

Use keywords naturally instead of forcing them in where they don’t belong. Today, search engines use advanced semantics to understand your content. Pages are regularly served up as a match for queries even though they don’t include a single instance of the searched for keyword or phrase.

Google Wants Secure Websites

Site security is a hot topic and you need to ensure that user data is secure. Google announced their intention to mark sites using the regular http as insecure, so if you haven’t switched to https, then consider doing that ASAP. Keep in mind that https can result in a slower site load time, so make sure you’re with a hosting company that has lightning fast servers.

Search Is Personal

The days of everyone seeing the same set of search results for a query are long gone. Search engines show different results to users based on factors like location, search history and previous engagement with other brands in the search space. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do to influence any of this.

What you can do is use traditional marketing tactics to reach your target audience despite these changes in the SERPs.

More than ever before, website owners need to deliver quality. On-site SEO should focus on providing valuable content and an excellent user experience. Your marketing and off-site SEO should be handled (or overseen) by professionals who know how to boost your traffic without hurting your site.

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by Chris London of Pixel Productions Inc. The Everything Design Company