10 Tips to Boost Your SEO in 2016

According to hubspot.com, in the U.S. alone, an average of 12 billion web searches are conducted each month. SEO will gain importance more than anything else as it helps you drive quality traffic, get visibility, boost your brand and lend your business the credibility it needs to succeed. After all, what is the point of creating so much content and graphics if it is not visible to the audience when they run search query.

This year, search engine optimization will be as powerful as ever, but search engines are getting smarter — and it’s harder than ever to use dodgy tricks to fool them, so make sure that you have built your site in the right way and regularly posting quality content to drive a steady stream of traffic to your pages. Now let’s take a look at the best SEO trends and developments that are set to rock the world in the year ahead.

Providing High-quality Content

As we all know, content is the most important part of the site, and content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers. Accordingly, the goal of content marketing is to provide value to visitors.

If you want to create a great content marketing campaign you should focus on providing answers. Every word you write should have value and give answers to the questions your readers might have. Take a moment to search Google for something you find interesting. You will see that many of the articles on the first page are how-tos and list posts. There's a reason these posts get on the first page of Google: they provide value.

Social Content Will Gain Prominence

In the coming times, content from social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will gain more importance on the SERPs. Already, 76% marketers use Social Media to support and boost SEO, cites an article published at Impactbnd.com. In 2016, marketers will do everything possible to make their Facebook posts or tweets rank higher on the SERPs.

Isn’t that amazing?! We predict that more social media content will be indexed on Google and other popular search engines such as Bing and Yahoo. This will in turn blur the lines between ‘web’ and ‘social media’ in terms of SEO strategies. So, be prepared to find, collect and use your valuable social content for optimizing your page for maximum visibility.  For brand names, social media profiles are amongst the top results in search listings. For instance, if you search “Designhill” on Google, the company’s Facebook page, Twitter profile and the LinkedIn page appear as the top listings. See for yourself!

Blog.kissmetrics.com states that links to content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and other social networks help the search engine crawlers understand what websites are credible and should be ranked for what keyword phrases.

Videos Will Still Rule

We all know that videos are a great way of keeping audience engaged and entertained. But do you know that by using enough videos, you can improve the ranking of your page on the SERPs. A report by Marketing Land states that videos make for 62% of all Google searches universally. Moreover, Google has started giving attention to blended results/searches. So, why not grab this opportunity to appear on the first page of search results by including an engaging video in your content? According to Quicksprout.com, videos get 50 times better organic page ranks in Google as against plain, static text results. Also, video searches garner 41% higher click-through rate as compared to plain, static text content, according to Relesoo.com.

Many marketers chose to drive their modern marketing engine with the fuel of Video SEO in 2015. And we predict that more marketers and businesses will embrace the trend of videos in the coming year too.

Now, the only way to appear in the search engine pages like this is by uploading your videos on You Tube or through video SEO. It is important that Google is able to find your video content, successfully index it and display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms.

Optimize the images on your site

Optimizing your images by compressing and resizing them may reduce the sizes of the images by a great extent, decreasing the page sizes and thus improving page loading performance on your blog. You may use online image resizing and compressing tools as well as their offline counterparts.

Make sure the images that you upload in WordPress are already optimized, but even if you don’t have already optimized images to upload, you can use a plugin like Smush.it to optimize and reduce the sizes of uploaded images automatically.

You can also add proper image tags to images in your posts to help them rank better in image searches. You can also include additional keywords through alt tags in your posts.

Voice Search Function a Must

These days, people who are on the go use voice search simply because it is more convenient and safer, especially when someone is driving or multi-tasking. It is becoming a huge part of mobile usage as it has taken away the pain of typing keywords to run a search query. Almost all mobile devices have a voice search functions. The popularity of voice searches has been spurred by Microsoft, Google, and Apple launching their own versions of advanced voice-responsive assistants – Cortana, Google Now and Siri.

Even ‘Domino’s Pizza’ has a ‘voice-ordering feature. However, make sure that your content is easily searchable through voice searches by using long-tail keywords, which are more likely to be spoken than conventional keywords.  Google Study finds voice search mostly used to ask for directions. For teens, doing a voice search while watching TV (59%) and while with friends (57%) are the highest use cases, according to marketingland.com. Whereas for adults, voice searching is done the most while watching TV (36%), followed by when with friends (24%) and while cooking (23%).

Content Aggregation will get Bigger & Better

According to Digitalcurrent.com, Knowledge Graph, wiki, local, maps, social media, news, images and videos make for 85% of Google search results. These stats indicates that now people look for sources that provide all relevant information for a particular subject or topic that at one place.

A blog published at imediaconnection.com explains that content aggregation is a practical way of finding, collating, amassing, consolidating, presenting, sharing, and displaying content around pre-specified set of criteria to appeal target audience. If you too are planning to do so, make sure that you collect and curate content from different, high-authority sources and display it at one place for your users to see to build your authority.

A great example of content curation is using the humble newsletter, Next Draft by Dave Pell, who has amassed over 160,000 subscribers to his daily email which shares the most interesting stories in business, culture, and tech, an article in Jeff Bullas explained. Another example is Inbound.org which was built by Moz and Hubspot to increase their reach even further.

Mobile-Friendly Is a Must

Since May 2015, mobile search has surpassed desktop search in ten countries, including the US and Japan, and it's a fact that this trend will continue. At this point, it’s a must for every webmaster to keep their website mobile-friendly.

Three tools that you can use to check whether your site is mobile-friendly are Bing's Mobile Friendliness Test Tool, Google's Mobile-Friendly Test, and mobiReady. The first and second are good, but they don't tell you why your site is mobile-friendly or not. mobiReady is a more sophisticated tool. I recommend using it because it gives you an enhanced view of your website analysis and uses a rating system. When your site scores higher, the more capable it will be of providing a quality user experience on mobile devices. Furthermore, it gives you a detailed list of website performance failures, and why some of these factors lower your page result.

In order for your website to perform well in mobile-friendly test tools, follow these tips:

l  Avoid software that is not common on mobile devices, especially Flash.

l  Remember to make your site responsive if you are coding it from scratch, or use a responsive framework/theme.

l  Be sure the content fits within the screen viewport so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom.

l  Format text in a way that should be readable without zooming.

l  Place links far enough apart from each other so visitors can easily touch the correct one.

In case you are using a CMS for your website, check these guides provided by Google.

Don't forget: a mobile-friendly approach gives your site a great boost in Google's rankings. A non-mobile-friendly competitor doesn't stand a chance against a mobile-friendly site.

Keep Faster Loading Time on Your Site

Sites with a slow loading time don’t only annoy visitors — they also decrease SEO rankings. Top-ranking pages get loaded for about 1.1 sec, but on the other hand, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Your site is probably between these two limits. Check these tools for analyzing your site's page speed and see what you can improve.

PageSpeed Insights is a tool offered by Google which helps to localize speed problems on your site. It has a ranking system from 0 to 100 where 100 is the highest score. The best feature of Google's PageSpeed is that it shows what needs to be critically fixed. It also shows other improvements you can make and how to fix them.

YSlow is an add-on for browsers that suggests ways to improve performance based on grades. Each component analysis has its grade. YSlow is great when you want to see the size of components according to their types. If you are serious about your website's performance, I recommend adding YSlow to your arsenal because it is based on rules created by Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team.

GTmetrix is another free tool that suggests ways to improve website speed. It's an efficient tool because it shows performance issues which are measured by both PageSpeed Insights and YSlow. It also displays a waterfall chart and three other charts measuring the performance of the website. For a more detailed waterfall analysis, Web Page Performance Test is another helpful tool.

To make your site load faster, there are many factors you should consider. Here are a few:

l  Use YUI Compressor compression to reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files.

l  Be sure to reduce HTTP requests on your site. Also, reduce external files that need to be loaded such as style sheets, scripts and images.

l  Improve your server response time. This delay is usually caused by slow routing, lack of adequate memory or slow database queries.

l  Use browser caching so that when a user visits your site again, the browser doesn't have to reload the entire page, just some components.

l  When you optimize your images be sure to keep their size not too large or too small, and use the right format according to the purpose of your image. It is advised to use JPEG for photographs and PNG for graphics.

Don't Leave Behind Local SEO

This trend is only going stronger over the years. According to Entrepreneur.com, local SEO is likely to gain solid grounds in the coming days.

As a marketer, you have to let Google know where you are located and what you are offering so that your chances of showing up on pages, especially in front of the relevant audience, increase. It is must to have your local pages which will include the name of your business, address etc. with Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Since Google came out with its “Pigeon” update, local SEO has gained significant prominence forcing businesses and marketers to focus on a local tangent.  So, ensure of having location specific keywords and personalize content basis your target audiences’ location to stay ahead in the game in 2016. Check out some stats to know the benefits of ranking in local search results.

Local searches lead 50% of mobile visitors to visit stores within a day.

(Source: Searchengineland.com)

More than 60% consumers have used local information in ads.

(Source: Business2community.com)

50% mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding local results.

(Source: Business2community.com)

Your listing in the local pages can increase consumer engagement with your business and your ranking. For instance, check out this example of three hospitals. The one that has the highest number of reviews ranks the highest. (Image source: Search Engine Journal)

Keywords Are Important, but Don't Try to Fool Google

 It's a long gone era when webmasters would try to "fool" Google with keywords. Now they must understand use keywords in the right context as much as possible.

Since the Google Hummingbird update, instead of chasing rankings for specific keywords in a question, it's better to figure out the context of a question. Answering questions is vital to any SEO strategy. Rather than focusing on a few phrases or keywords, brainstorm for conversation phrases people can use to look for your site.

A keyword strategy is still necessary. Here are some keyword research tools you will find useful: Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMrush and Ubersuggest. They will help you find popular keywords and phrases where you can create strategies around them. When you start planning a keyword strategy, keep an eye on Long-tail and LSI keywords.