Are you still operating on principles of web design and SEO which lost their vigor years ago? If you’re not sure, consider these four points—then get to work, because you might be pretty busy for the foreseeable future.
1. Natural link profiles
In years past, it was common sense that you didn’t waste a single backlink; anchor text needed to be exactly the search terms you were trying to rank for. After the engines began to get smarter, the trend changed. Exact matches were still valuable, but the savviest SEO firms also used related terms, with one or more words shifted to synonyms and plurals. Today, the search engines are savvier than ever—and they know how we’ve been gaming the system. That’s why a modern web marketer needs a natural link profile, one which includes as many “Click here” anchors and raw URLs as it does keyword-appropriate links.
2. Navigability assessment
The days of labyrinths of redundant pages meant to present a pleasing face to Google web crawlers, with no mind for how human readers would feel about them, are long gone. The bots can spot a well-built, easily navigated site, and they care about it. Google devs have mentioned adaptive or scalable web design by name as a benefit to your search results—so make sure your web design ditches the separate mobile page as soon as possible.
3. Natural content
Once upon a time, Google couldn’t really tell if your site contained real articles or nonsense with the occasional keyword inserted. It’s been getting better with each passing year, and these days you want good content written by real people in as many places as possible. No awkward keyword insertions, no poorly-spun articles—real content, including images, videos, and everything else.
4. Social media algorithms
Websites need to consider how they’re going to be treated by social media as much as the search engines, now that they’re one of the primary gateways of the internet. Social marketing campaigns work differently now that the social networks have gotten savvy—noise alone isn’t enough. You need high quality content, because they’re using the same high-quality algorithms as Google to assess what you’re putting out there and curate it for their guests. Facebook can even recognize factors like volume adjustment on videos to determine how much a particular person cares about that video—so make sure your social campaigns are focused on quality and appeal, rather than simply ‘being there’.
A lot of the advice can seem daunting, and it can be. That is why many business owners choose to work with an SEO/marketing firm that specializes in that sort of thing as seen on this site.
If you’re going to go at it alone, the best advice would be to set aside time each day to work on your social media or marketing. Marketing is like vitamins or exercise; it has to be done on a regular basis to have any effect.
