A new year is upon us and although SEO is ever evolving, we like to reflect on the previous year and catch up with research conducted on what Google is looking for in the year ahead. Did you know that Google changes its algorithm several hundred times a year? That right there is motivation alone to take SEO seriously, if you're not up to date with Google's requirements someone else will be and they'll find themselves ahead of you.
During 2015 we came across a number of strategies that worked well and kept popping up in articles written by industry leaders. It is our opinion that the following technical SEO matters need to be taken seriously during the course of this year. We should all be doing these already, but if we aren't let's get started immediately:
During 2015 we came across a number of strategies that worked well and kept popping up in articles written by industry leaders. It is our opinion that the following technical SEO matters need to be taken seriously during the course of this year. We should all be doing these already, but if we aren't let's get started immediately:
- Mobile - We're almost a year from the day that Google launched their mobile algorithm update. This update somewhat separated web and mobile based searches - so if you're searching from your desktop you'll see a different set of search results to when you're on your mobile device. This means that if your website isn't mobile friendly, there's a good chance it won't be very visible in the search results. Considering how many people are using mobile devices, it's crucial to ensure that your website is mobile friendly.
- Internal Linking - If we received a dollar each time we were presented with a website that had bad internal linking we would be very wealthy. Internal linking is a powerful way to flow authority around a website, in doing so you spread the website's authority across multiple pages and this results in your pages receiving increased visibility in the search engines. We don't just want our home page to appear, we want our other pages to appear too and internal linking assists with this!
- Local Optimisation - With the advent of mobile search, so comes local optimisation. Local optimisation in a nutshell is the process of ensuring that your website appears in localised results. In other words, if you have a sea food restaurant in Cape Town you would naturally want your website to appear when someone searches for "sea food restaurant Cape town" for example. Local optimisation ensures that this happens and this is most definitely one of the most important SEO matters for 2016.
- Technical Foundation - We don't believe that there will ever be a time, or at least not for a very long time, where the foundational technical matters on a website aren't important. Time and time again we're presented with website's that have weak technical foundations and upon fixing the problems the website immediately starts to gain traction in the search engines. Never take technical SEO for granted!