Let's look at some of the important steps in SEO. First, those who want to achieve the best search results must follow best practices in web development and design to ensure that every line of code and every piece of content on a website are optimized for the search engine. For example, it is important to make sure that there are direct and working links to each page you want the search engines to index. The most important pages should be accessible directly from the homepage of your website. In compliance to web development standards , outdated content, and broken links are just a few examples of the many factors that could lower your search ranking score. The next step in SEO is to build your content around a set of keywords that are most relevant to your products or services. Simply put, you must make sure that the content on your website matches the keywords that people use to find you. You have to make sure that you're using keywords appropriately all throughout the copy on your website. It is also important to use those keywords in the headlines and titles on each of those pages. Don't forget to use your target keywords in the meta tags, meta descriptions, image tags, and actual URLs for those pages. Next, how content is planned and laid out has important usability and SEO implications. Users want to find what they're looking for quickly and easily, while website owners want search engine spiders to be able to access an index or applicable pages. If your information architecture follows best practices, both sides can win. Another important technical factor to consider are the changes and updates to the search engines themselves. For example, Google changes its search algorithm around 500-600 times each year. While most of these changes are minor, the search engine giant occasionally rows out a major update that affects search results in significant ways. For search marketers, it is crucial to keep track of these major updates and understand how they could affect your search rankings. Besides cleaning the computer codes and optimizing the content on a webpage, it is equally important to consider features outside of the website to improve search ranking. The quality and quantity of inbound links to a webpage is an important factor in determining the relative importance of a webpage. Just like how a working professional should always cultivate and maintain good relationships with those who can give them positive references. As SEO specialist must frequently examine and monitor the quality and quantity of inbound links. Some of the key questions you may ask include: are those sites linked to your webpage credible and reputable? Are they popular? Are they important? What else can you do to get high-quality inbound links? Today, searchers and search engines are looking for respectable links only. There are at least two great ways to generate real quality backlinks from respectable sites. The first is to do regular press releases. Once those releases are search engine optimized and have relevant links in the releases back to the pages on your website, you should distribute them via an electronic wire service. Sites like Business Wire and PR Newswire will share your press releases with all major and minor news outlets, all of which have website versions that post content like yours on a regular basis. This immediately generates highly respectable links back to your site, and that's improving your off-site SEO. Another way to create quality inbound links and improve off-site SEO is through guest blogging. This requires you to reach out to online publications that your prospects are already reading. For example, to find an appropriate blog, you can go to Google and type in guest blogs and your industry. The result will likely be a number of blog sites appropriate for your prospective customers. However, if you are going to leverage this tactic, be sure to always post only truly relevant, truly compelling, and truly unique content. Once you identify the blogs, you can start reaching out to those editors and offer to write a regular blog post. Most of the editors are thrilled to have industry experts contributing to their blogs. To recap and summarize, here are a few key tasks of SEO. First, you need to create and maintain a search engine-friendly website structure. Next, you will need to develop a well-researched list of key terms and phrases. Then you will need to optimize the content and the codes of your web pages to target those key phrases. Good-quality content that is both distinctive and original will always increase the visibility of your website. Next, you need to increase and maintain link popularity by improving the quantity and quality of inbound links. Finally, users are always at the center of user experience and therefore, the essence of driving website traffic. You should study and incorporate user insights into your website design. Good user experience will attract healthy traffic and will improve search visibility. While search is still one of the most important channels of digital marketing, it is rapidly changing. I would like to quickly highlight some of the future trends of search marketing. First, and perhaps the most important shift in search marketing is from desktop to mobile. Google's revenue data shows a remarkable increase in mobile search from $5.93 billion in 2014 to $13.74 billion in 2017, nearly tripled in three years. While the revenue front desktop and mobile display advertising remains stable, there is a noticeable decrease in Google's desktop search business. The trend is very clear. A second important trend in search marketing is the rise of Amazon. Recent statistics show that Amazon has overtaken search engines and other retailers to become consumer's first destination for products search, more than half of the consumers now begin their online shopping on Amazon. In other words, while Google might still be the dominant search engine, it's important to consumer marketing, maybe decreasing. Third, much-improved speech recognition and voice-activated search has a significant impact on search optimization. Unlike the keyword-based searches that consumers typically conduct on a desktop computer, voice searches typically use natural language and longer sentences. They present new challenges to keyword planning and content development for SEO purposes. Finally, there's a rise of artificial intelligence, smart home, and personal devices , and digital assistance. Instead of using search engines to get a list of objectively evaluated and ranked search results, more and more consumers rely on direct recommendations made by crowd-sourced recommender systems, such as Yelp, and artificially intelligent digital assistants, such as Apple's Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon's Alexa. These recommendation systems help information seekers, sort, evaluate, and select from the large number of product alternatives offered on the web. Instead of being on the top of search results page, marketers must acquire the endorsement of the smart recommenders. It involves a different set of strategic and technical issues that are evolving constantly. Search advertisers should pay close attention to these technological trends and large shifts in consumer behavior to stay relevant.
