What matters in SEO in 2016?

What matters in SEO in 2016?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is sometimes seen as a black art. There are no definitive methods that will provide guaranteed results. But good SEO practices will increase the chance of the company’s website or blog getting optimized. These practices will help in increasing the SEO, but they need to stay updated as the search engine updates. Here are a few things that can be considered to get good SEO in 2016.

Make your website mobile friendly

In one of the latest updates, Google will be ranking the websites on mobile search results. This will not only help with SEO, but also to increase the user experience when they search using a mobile. Having a mobile friendly website will enable the mobile users to search content in a more user friendly way. User friendliness means that the web user will  not be interested in searching content which directs them to a desktop based theme being viewed on the mobile.

It is therefore important that a company should design a website which is mobile optimized theme if they  are looking to get a healthy SEO for mobile devices.

Social post ranking

The search engine results are incorporating social media posts like tweets and Facebook to be a part of the results in order to increase the SEO. For instance, if you want to read about what a certain celebrity tweeted on Twitter till date, you would have to search through the news articles which mentions the story. But what Google is trying to achieve for you as a user is to offer you the source of the news story (search engine result) which is linked to the tweet itself.

How this can increase in terms of SEO? It has been observed that many sports related articles are embedded with Twitter and Facebook. Having tweets or Facebook posts embedded with the articles or blogs will to some extent help in the SEO activity. But the SEO of that article depends on how much value is given to that embedded tweet or post.

Video content is the road ahead

At the moment, most of the content which is available online is digested through reading articles or blogs. But with the advancement of technology, it wouldn’t be surprising if we find articles embedded with videos, similar to tweets and Facebook posts. Video content will also add on a certain value in terms of SEO to an article. For example, linking a unique video having a  big number of views to the article or blog, it will help the article to improve its rank in the search engine results.

 Voice search

As the number of mobile users has increased, there has been a rise of searching on mobiles. This has also surged the demand for voice search. More and more people are making using of the voice feature on their smartphones to search for content like locating businesses or products and services they are looking for.  Some people use voice search for multi-tasking while they are driving, whereas many others find it easier and faster to talk rather type their queries on the phone.

This means, the businesses need to optimize their websites to target these consumers. Search engine optimization will now require to shift to keywords that are more voice-search friendly. It is also important to know that follow up questions will become a common in voice search, as only a small amount of information is delivered in each response.

Final words

This year, SEO needs to be focused more on mobile marketing and how it will help the businesses to get on the mobile-friendly bandwagon.