2018 and the subtle art of SEO
by Krishnan Menon

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been the mantra for digital marketers over the past couple of years. If you have been following this trend, you would have noticed that SEO has been evolving. It has progressed from simply bombarding one’s content with keywords and spammy backlinks to a more subtle process. This has probably got you wondering - So, what is it that works now? Here are a few things we found to be useful in building good SEO ranking today:

AMP up your Content: Google is all about mobiles now with their new Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). And nearly all the users have gone mobile. So it’s a good idea to make mobile your priority too. If you don’t have a mobile version of your site, we suggest you get started on it immediately. If you are running two separate versions for mobile and desktop, it would be better to consolidate the two. This is will ensure consistency in user experience.

Speed Freaks: Lighten up your site. It’s vital that your site is not too heavy and doesn’t take too long to load. This will severely affect your SEO ranking. Do not blast your webpage with pop-ups. In this hyperspeed world, your users are not going to wait for more than a couple of seconds for your site to load. A well designed and responsive page that loads quickly will make both your users and Google happy.

Links, links, links: We cannot emphasize how important it is for your SEO to have valid and trustworthy backlinking. More than the number of links, it is the quality of the link that is crucial to your SEO. If you have backlinks from a low-quality directory, it might get your site penalized. So, create backlinks only from reputable sources. It’s common for sites to earn bad backlinks which can affect its SEO ranking, so you’ll need to keep a tab on your backlinks on a regular basis.

Text is so last year: SEO is progressing from solely textual content to other formats. Infographics, slides, videos, and other multimedia content is slowly becoming the point of focus for SEO, so keep an eye out for this on your site too. Another massive development is going to be the advent of Virtual Reality. It will be interesting to see how SEO will figure into VR content. Our advice, stay on top of all forms of content and optimize everything!

Swiper, go swiping: It’s okay to be a little sneaky when it comes to ensuring that your site ranks well. Don’t be too shy to check out what your competition is doing. If you find someone whose website is ranking higher than yours, check their site out. Find out what it is their doing right, how they are getting their backlinks and why their content is better. Then it’s a matter of making your content relevant to the user and more extensive compared to your competitors’.

All hail the mighty User!: Keep your users happy. Do everything that will make their experience comfortable. Do not scare them away with pop-ups, cluttered design, long-waiting time. Happy user means more shares for your page, meaning more backlinks, meaning better ranking. The user should walk away having learned something valuable from your content, invest in creating content that is useful to the users.

These are just a few things to keep in mind to improve your SEO. We’ll leave you with one last tip, there is plenty of material available which claim to have the best hacks and tricks to improve your ranking, we suggest you do not follow these blindly. Most of those methods will either end up crashing your rating or get your site disabled for breaking one of Google’s many regulations. So, it’ll be best to run tests on your own or hire a reliable agency to guide you through the process.