SEO refers to search engine optimization or the process of optimizing a website so that people can easily find it via search engines like Google.
Similar to other areas in the tech industry, SEO is constantly changing. The once fail-proof method of consistently landing top SERPs (search engine results pages) became irrelevant within a few months. SEO practices that once dominated the industry quickly fell out of favor.
The Google algorithm itself changes constantly, sometimes with multiple changes happening within months. 2017 has brought about the dominance of Google AMP (accelerated mobile pages)Accelerated Mobile Pages, the rise of HTTPS, the importance of backlinks etc. 2018 has much more to offer.
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| SEO Trends |
Main Trends in 2018
● Voice Search is More Real than Ever
Since voice searches are increasing an increase in the featured snippets can be seen, which is the source for Google in voice searches.
Google has developed the Cloud Vision API, which is capable of recognizing an enormous number of objects.
● Survival of the Fittest
In today’s fast-paced, on-demand society, people want things, including information, immediately.
Nothing is more frustrating than clicking on a website that appears to answer your question exactly, only to have to wait for the page to load. If the page doesn’t load in 5 seconds, you’re off onto another website that can hopefully give you the answers you need.
People don’t like slow web pages. If your page is slow, your site traffic will suffer. Page speed is a user experience feature that is expected to be kept by all websites.
Google expects pages to load in under three seconds. By taking Google’s speed test we can know the speed of our web page.
● Page Relevance 2.0
Google continues in its quest to provide the best web browsing experience to users. Besides offering users websites that are safe, Google searches for sites that best match the user’s search – even if that’s a little different from their actual query.
This means that search engines will evaluate the relevance of the content on your website. One of the ways that Google assess the relevance of a website’s content is with Latent Semantic Indexing(LSI)Latent Semantic Indexing. Through Latent Semantic Indexing Google can gather content from billions of websites and parse through the content, scanning for related terms and words.
● Mobiles will be more Powerful and of Huge Importance
Smartphone’s dominate the world and more and more web browsing is occurring on mobile devices. In fact, the number of people using their Smartphone’s to browse the Internet is higher than the number of people who browse on a traditional desktop computer.
It is no longer optional to have a mobile-friendly website. It is now required and expected by the search engines and the users.
In fact, mobile friendliness is now a search ranking factor. Check if your site is mobile friendly on Google’s mobile test Website Auditor, under Content Analysis.
● Personalized Contents in SREP
Besides the traditional search ranking factors, such as page speed, content relevancy and, page authority, search engines are also using information about the user, such as interests, browsing history and location, to provide a personalized search results list.
Google, along with some other search engines, have been utilizing personalized SERPs for many years.
When personalization comes into effect, when someone searches for a keyword for the first time, the website needs to do it’s best to appear among the top results in the unbiased SERP. If the searcher clicks on the listing, the website becomes the preferred entity, and the subsequent searches will most likely include the site as the top result.
● Rise of “Linkless” Backlinks
Links have been the trust signal for search engines — one that SEOs spent the most time on optimizing. But times are changing, and linkless mentions may be becoming an off-page signal of equal weight. It has become the best (and most ethical) practice for websites to try and get links from more reputable, outside sources.
While links from authoritative, outside sources gave websites some search ranking, the further sophistication of Google search robots is slowly taking away the coveted power of backlinks.
Search engines now have the ability to associate mentions of brands, institutions, organizations, and people without the need of linking to their corresponding web pages.
There are much more to explore in the coming years such as youtube, the videos will account majority for the coming years. Money making with Youtube
There are much more to explore in the coming years such as youtube, the videos will account majority for the coming years. Money making with Youtube
