Marketers are beefing up their investment on content creation, which could possibly drive traffic and popularity of the websites. But to leverage these efforts, they also need to learn the rules for SEO in 2017. The days when driving traffic equals the use of keywords are long gone. Experts remarked that the SEO strategy revolves around another big-money marketing focus: experience.
Historically, the recommendations for SEO have been focused on keywords. But with the search engine becoming more intelligent, content creators have less control about how their pages are showing up and what words they’re showing up for.
On the basis of an August 2015 study on the future of SEO by Moz Inc., the most important factors for SEO in the next year will be mobile friendliness, simplicities, a page’s perceived value, usage data, and the webpage’s design. In contrast, the influence of paid links and anchor texts will be reduced within in the next few years.
Intention is everything
In the old days, it was all about clicking the links, but now search engines care more about how the customers are interacting with the website. Are they going back and clicking on results, or are they finding the answers they’re looking for when they’re on your site? Satisfying people's needs in a straightforward way matters more today.
Keywords are no longer the perfect tool
Keywords are not that magical today, and search engine, such as Google has new ways to interpret meanings. For instance, if you want to rank the best restaurant in the city, you have to mention “the best restaurant” in the title or content of the article for several times or put it in the meta description. But with the advancement of search engine, the best restaurants could also equal to great dining experience or high rate.
Also, to get the most relevant and accurate results, the search queries people provide should be between three and five words long. If they only type "marketing," or any one-or-two-word query, they will not get the results they want. As content creators, when you are thinking about optimization, you have to take this perspective into consideration.
User experience matters
The original content is more important than ever, whether it’s an image or a video, or long-form content, anything you can put together that’s going to justify someone’s desire to read or share it. But do remember to scatter this original content to different places, making them digestible. If you take content from other website, give them credit and add some attribution to make it yours.
Longer article wins easily
Longer articles, between 1,200 to 1,500 words, (with more words and images to rank on the page) perform better in search, and they’re ranking higher in SEO. Tips for the structure of the article is breaking up long-form content with subheads, bullet points and images throughout the copy to make it easy for readers to scan and digest it quickly.
Optimize for mobile
The number of people reading news on their smartphones is increasing exponentially, so it’s important to ensure that the content is searchable on mobile devices. In addition, making sure that Google can understand the content found within a mobile app, and leveraging the marketing of the app with respect to SEO, is an opportunity on the consumer and business-to-business marketing side.
Use unique pictures
The same image can show up in hundreds of places around the Web, but creating unique content around the images is what makes it stand out. The most important SEO tip for the next few years is to focus on your audience. In the past, what marketers care about is to promote their content, but now it’s about delivering what people actually want to see, and that perspective will boost your SEO ranking.
No comments:
Post a Comment