SEO changes at a rapid rate. However, there are some practices that you should always engage in like having quality content, optimizing your site for mobile devices, and engaging in social media marketing. What are the SEO tips you can rely on in 2017 and beyond to make sure your website has the best chance for a top the search engine ranking? We’ll explore them here.

Create Amazing Content

This will not only help you become more searchable, but it will ensure that you get quality backlinks. People will see your top notch content and link to it on their blogs and users will put it up on their social media pages. Make your content interactive by providing links and opportunities for interaction on your social media pages or your comments section. Add new content regularly and make it valuable to the end user. Your content should always have value.

Decrease your Crawl Budget

Did you know that every website gets a ‘crawl budget’ with a Search Engine? Yes, this means a search engine will only crawl a certain amount of your website. So, on pages that are not exactly stellar use noindex/nofollow tags on pages that you don’t really need to appear in the search engine results page such as your tags section of your checkout page. It’s not that hard and you don’t need to be really technical to do it. Just one visit to your robots.txt file should do the trick.

Get on Board with Influencer Marketing

Influencers are people with big audiences online. Think Guy Kawasaki and people like him. You may have a different influencer for your industry, but it’s worth it to do some investigating into who those influencers are and make contact with them. Strike up a friendship. Share some of their content. Keep writing good content on your site. They’ll be more likely to share well-written content with their followers because they have a reputation to uphold. Influencer marketing can give you backlinks, traffic, and exposure that you might not otherwise get.

mobile friendly site

Make Sure You Are Mobile-Friendly

If you aren’t mobile-friendly yet, you are behind the times. Most people use their mobile devices for searching for businesses online. It appears that Google has made being mobile-friendly a part of its ranking criteria and will penalize you if you’re not. Most website tools like WordPress are naturally made to be mobile-friendly. Remember to be mobile-friendly is not just for iPhones and Androids, but also tablets and iPads. Your site should be easily viewable at any screen size.

Leverage the Power of Social Media to Improve Your SEO

Social media does have an impact on SEO. In order to utilize social media properly, you must:

  • Produce quality, SEO-friendly content,
  • Use tools like Buzzsumo to find authority social accounts in your industry,
  • Compliment their brand, their audience and ask them to take a peek at your latest content. If they like it, ask them to share it with their audience. (Yes, this is a similar strategy to influencer marketing, but it works for social media too.)
  • Make sure they include the naked URL in their social post about your content. You don’t want a ‘nofollow’ link.
  • Think quality over quantity. It’s more important to have a share from 5 quality accounts than 50 so-so accounts.

You can also leverage your content on your own social media accounts. Never forget to post your newest blog to your social media accounts so that your own audience can share it with their contacts. This is another way to leverage social media.

As you can see, SEO in 2017 is not a brand new game. It just requires that you utilize quality content in a variety of ways. Don’t forget to be mobile-friendly. These are our SEO tips for 2017. Stay tuned to our blog for more SEO tips.