SEO has changed drastically during the last few years. Especially last year, since Google’s latest updates. 2014 is the year where even more effort is needed in the field of SEO for a company to remain competitive on the internet.
A company has to pay attention to the following 5 elements in order to succeed nowadays in SEO.
1.On-page optimization
One of SEO’s most important elements has been, and still is, the website’s optimization, making the website friendly to search engines and all of its pages visible in SERP’s. A website has to be designed carefully all the way from the beginning, so that it is more easily indexed by search engine crawlers, because there are so many factors that may affect an SEO-friendly website.
On-page optimization is not a procedure that should be performed solely during the website’s original design, but is an ongoing process that must be made and checked at regular intervals. The most important issues related to on-page optimization are meta tags, URLs, usability, navigation, index options and nofollow, heading tags, sitemaps, redirects, multi-language issues, pagination, canonical URLs, duplicate content, robots.txt, schema snippets, sub-domains, folders and others.
Many Content Management Systems (CMS) present serious weaknesses on the context of Search Engine Optimization, that’s why special attention is needed on behalf of Webmasters. In order to solve similar issues related to your website, you can use the WSA Spider tool from WebSeoAnalytics.
2.Social Media Signals
Social Media Signals are gaining more importance as they bring more traffic to a website and also increase Domain and Page Authority. One should not neglect the fact that the primary goal of search engines is to provide the best possible results to the end user. Therefore, it is reasonable for a web page that goes viral on Social Media to be important for search engines. Despite the fact that most Social Media sites have nofollow links, search engines use them to locate popular web pages. The most important social media signals for SEO are Shares and Likes on Facebook, links to Tweets and Retweets on Twitter, Shares and +1 on Google+.
3.Content
A website’s content is becoming more and more valuable for the site’s web traffic, as well as for SEO. The fact that ‘Content is King’ as believed by the SEO practitioners is confirmed every day. Nowadays, if a website has no blog section and it is not updated daily by professional columnists, then it cannot keep up with the rising competition. Good articles tend to attract visitors from a variety of sources like social media and organic traffic. That happens because great content tends to get shared more often (social media) and at the same time it is more likely to attract a high amount of backlinks (organic traffic).
4.AuthorRank
Google+ is becoming increasingly important in Google’s Search Engine Result Pages. Someone can become a Google+ user easily, as he only has to create a Google account and configure his own profile. Every author then can link his own articles with Google+ by using authorship markup and tag rel=author.
Active participation in Google+ (interaction with other users, comments, shares, +1 etc.) seems to have a positive influence to a website’s rankings. Articles by authors with higher AuthorRank have shown high rankings in Google’s result pages (But we must be extra careful here because correlation doesn’t equal causation). Nevertheless, Google+ can be used to improve an authors’ AuthorRank. This could be achieved by growing contact circles, by contributing constructively with aptly comments, valuable links and interesting content similar to that of other users.
5.Mobile
According to a 2014 research, 25% of all web traffic is coming from mobile devices (tablets and smartphones). It is evident that this traffic cannot be ignored and that websites should be mobile-friendly.
There are two common approaches to follow in order to make a site mobile-friendly:
- Create a distinct website for mobile users which is accordingly designed, easier to search and which is loading faster, thus decreasing bounce rate. This should usually have a distinct URL e.g. m.mydomain.com. A drawback to this approach is the fact that a visitor could search for information not available in mobile versions of the website (some mobile versions of specific websites omit several pages which are available in desktop versions).
- The best approach for the majority of websites is the “responsive design”. Following that approach, a website is able to recognize the end user’s device (e.g. if the user has access through a laptop/PC or a smartphone) and adapt its appearance depending on the end user.
Conclusion
2014 is a year with many challenges for the SEO community. On-page optimization has always been one of the most important elements for SEO. Social Media Signals have also gained more significance especially in the last few years, and Content that helps users to meet their needs, as well as improving SERP’s position for various keywords is necessary in a competitive environment. Moreover, AuthorRank is the new ‘hot trend’ in SEO and every website should emphasize in this part of optimization. Finally, having a mobile-friendly website is vitally important, in a world where about 25% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices.
Concluding, as search engines are getting smarter, old SEO techniques are considered to be deprecated and harmful. The aforementioned 5 elements are the proper recipe for successful SEO in 2014.
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