Actionable guide to SEO in 2017

Great Article for the Newbie or Expert SEO to start 2017

Actionable guide to SEO in 2017

The year of 2016 was relatively calm for SEOs. But no matter how peaceful the current SEO landscape looks, it doesn’t mean you can lean back in your chair and relax!

RankBrain, semantic search, AMP, and mobile-first are among the top buzz words of the past twelve months. Penguin and Panda have become smarter and are now part of the core algorithm.

So, to help you catch the wind and brush up your SEO skills, I’ve prepared a list of recommendations SEOs should focus on right now.

The rule is simple — search engines won’t rank your site unless they can find it. So, just like before, it is extremely important to make sure search engines are able to discover your site’s content — and that they can do that quickly and easily. And here’s how.

1. Keep a logical site structure

2. Make use of an XML sitemap & RSS feeds

The XML sitemap helps search bots discover and index content on your site. This is similar to how a tourist would discover more places in an unfamiliar city if they had a map.

RSS/Atom feeds are a great way to notify search engines about any fresh content you add to the site. In addition, RSS feeds are often used by journalists, content curators and other people interested in getting updates from particular sources.

Google says: “For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS/Atom feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google to keep your content fresher in its index.”

3. Befriend Schema markup

Schema markup is used to tag entities (people, products, events, etc.) in your pages’ content. Although it does not affect your rankings, it helps search engines better interpret your content.

To put it simple, a Schema template is similar to a doorplate — if it says ‘CEO Larry Page’, you know whom to expect behind the door.

4. Leverage rich answers

Basically, a rich answer is a snippet that already contains a brief answer to the search query. It appears above other organic search results and thus enjoys more exposure.

Any website has a chance to be selected for the rich answers section. Here are a few things you may do to increase your chances of getting there:

1) Identify simple questions you might answer on your website;
2) Provide a clear direct answer;
3) Provide additional supporting information (like videos, images, charts, etc.).

CHAPTER 2 Master Panda survival basics

“Panda” is a filter in Google’s ranking algorithm that aims to sift out pages with thin, non-authentic, low-quality content. Early in 2016, Gary Illyes announced that “Panda” had become a part of Google core ranking algorithm. The bad news is that now you can’t tell for sure if your rankings changed due to “Panda” or other issues.

1. Improve content quality

2. Make sure you get canonicalization right

Canonicalization is a way of telling search engines which page should be treated as the “standardized” version when several URLs return virtually the same content.

The main purpose of this is to avoid internal content duplication on your site. Although not a huge offense, this makes your site look messy — like a wild forest in comparison to a neatly trimmed garden.

Google’s Penguin filter aims at detecting artificial backlink patterns and penalizing sites that violate its quality guidelines in regards to backlinks. Penguin has become a part of the core Google algorithm. In its early days, Penguin would hit an entire website. Currently, it’s more granular and it demotes particular pages that have “bad” links. Keeping your backlink profile look natural is another key point to focus on in 2017.

Quite a few UX-related metrics have made their way into Google’s ranking algorithm over the past years (site speed, mobile-friendliness, the HTTPs protocol). Hence, striving to improve user experience can be a good way to up your search engine rankings.

1. Increase site speed

There are quite a few factors that can affect page loading speed. Statistically, the biggest mistakes site owners make that increase page load time are: using huge images, using large-volume multimedia or other heavy design elements that make the site as slow as a snail.

Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to test your site speed and to get recommendations on particular issues to fix.

2. Improve engagement & click-through rates

The Bing and Yahoo! alliance, as well as Yandex, have officially confirmed they consider click-through rates and user behavior in their ranking algorithms. If you are optimizing for any of these search engines, it’s worth trying to improve these aspects.

While Google is mostly silent on the subject, striving for greater engagement and higher click-through rates tends to bring better rankings as well as indirect SEO results in the form of attracted links, shares, mentions, etc.

3. Consider taking your site HTTPs

In August 2014, Google announced that HTTPs usage is treated as a positive ranking signal.

Currently there is not much evidence that HTTPs-enabled sites outrank non-secure ones. The transition to HTTPS is somewhat controversial, because

a) Most pages on the Web do not involve the transfer of sensitive information;
b) If performed incorrectly, the transition from HTTP to HTTPS may harm your rankings;
c) Most of your site’s visitors do not know what HTTP is, so transferring to HTTPS is unlikely to give any conversion boost.

4. Get prepared for HTTP/2

HTTP/2 is a new network protocol that should replace the outdated HTTP/1.1. HTTP/2 is substantially faster than its predecessor. In terms of SEO, you would probably be able to gain some ranking boost due to the improved website speed.

On April 02, 2016 John Mueller mentioned on Google+ that Google Bot does not yet fully support HTTP/2, however the crawler will work normally for HTTP/2 websites. December 19 Google Webmasters tweeted “Setting up HTTP/2? Go for it! Googlebot won’t hold you back.” There are no furthers details. However, the tweet assumes that Google Bot now supports HTTP/2. At the time of writing, about 78% of web browsers support HTTP/2. You can keep track of HTTP/2 support by browsers on “Can I Use”. In fact, if your website runs on HTTPS you can already switch to HTTP/2 because most browsers already support it through HTTPS.

HTTP/2 is likely to become a “must” soon. Thus, keep an eye on the issue and be ready to implement this feature when required.

The number of mobile searches has finally exceeded the number of desktop searches. The inevitable has happened; Google has begun experiments with mobile-first index. It means that their algorithms will primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in the results. It doesn’t mean that your website will drop out of the index if it has no mobile version — Google will fall back on the desktop version to rank the site. However, if you stick to mobile-unfriendly design, user experience and rankings may suffer.

Accelerated Mobile Pages project (AMP for short) is a new Google initiative to build a better, more user friendly mobile Web by introducing a new “standard” for building web content for mobile devices. Basically, this new standard is a set of rules that form a simple, lighter version of HTML. And pages built in compliance with AMP are sure to load super-quick on all mobile devices.

According to Google’s VP of Engineering David Besbris:

• AMP pages are 4x faster, and use 10x less data compared to non-AMP pages;
• On average AMP pages load in less than one second;
• 90 percent of AMP publishers experience higher CTRs;
• 80 percent of AMP publishers experience higher ad viewability rates.

The official AMP Project help pages are the best starting point for those who want to try the new technology out.

AMP is a strictly validated format, and if some elements on your page do not meet the requirements, Google will most likely not serve this page to users. So after building your AMP page, check if it passes the validation.

Search engines favor websites with a strong social presence. Your Google+ posts or Tweets can make it to Google organic search results, which is a great opportunity to drive extra traffic. Although the likely effect of Twitter or Facebook links on SEO hasn’t been confirmed, Google said it treats social posts (that are open for indexing) just like any other webpages, so the hint here is clear.

Back in 2015, Google reduced the number of results in the local pack from 7 to 3 and removed addresses and phone numbers. The search engine made it harder for SEOs to get to the local pack.

To make things worse, in 2016 Google began showing ads on top of normal results in Local Finder. 2017 will probably see even more fierce competition in local results.