Search engine optimization and SEO practices are complicated stuff. There are a lot of things that to accomplish, and the process is tedious and repetitive. It can get overwhelming too. With over a decade in the business and online marketing industry, some ‘best’ practices still work in 2016. Rumors have spread that both link building and guest postings are dead. Well in fact, when these practices are completed correctly, the rewards are remarkable.
Best SEO Practices in 2016
1 – Obtain Quality Backlinks
The top of our list of SEO practices is link building. Backlinks are still critical for a website. It’s one of the factors the search engines use for ranking. Bear in mind that it is imperative to get backlinks from different sources or domains. Having hundreds or thousands of backlinks on a single domain signals a red flag and can be tagged as spam by search engines.
To simplify things, try to obtain 100 unique backlinks from 100 unique, relevant domains. The best and qualified links you can get are natural in form meaning; other webmasters link to your website by mentioning it as a brand or a resource from a post.
2 – Have an Interactive and Engaging Website
Based on research done by SimilarWeb, the study has concluded that websites with a higher bounce rate tend to rank lower in Google than sites that have lower bounce rates. Based on this generalization, it is essential that a website should be interactive and engaging to let visitors stay more and do more.
Spend time improving your bounce rate, do A/B split testing when needed. If you have a long and remarkable content, you may want to break it up into parts or create slideshows. Every button a site visitor clicks means engagement.
3 – Publish Long and Highly Informative Content
In today’s real world, people have lower attention spans. In a recent study, the average attention span only lasts for 5 seconds. It’s challenging to keep your site visitors hooked on your website unless they find it very useful and informative.
In contrast to the study, search engines love to crawl web pages that have long-form content. Surprisingly, search engines tend to rank these content higher compared to short content that usually contains 400 words or less. As extreme as it sounds, sometimes it pays to write a 1000-word article that is 10x more valuable than short articles. It’s worth the try.
#4 Loading Speed Matters
Site speed makes a difference in the SEO field. Both site visitors and Google prefer fast-loading websites. Who doesn’t? Moreover, Google dropped a hint that site speed is also part of their search ranking algorithm.
There are many other ‘best practices’ out there when you search the web. WSI WebSense has given you the best practices we’ve been using for our business and our clients that have proven to have results. Keep in mind that SEO has no reliable, repeatable formula. Each case is different and results change over time. If you have a campaign that you believe works best for your website, stick with it and take advantage of the success you’re getting. As long as you follow the search engine’s guidelines, you’re on the right track! But if you stop getting results, you need to back up and try something new. The SEO target is constantly changing, so you have to change also.