The excitement for New Year and a new start goes along with us through out the first quarter of the year, an essential time to establish some of the most important strategies for your brand and business. A new year marks the beginning of many things. It might not mark the beginning of something but changes are always expected and assured. Well, changes are the only constants in the world. So will the changes come in the emerging world, the digital world. To rule the digital world, one needs to be master of Search Engine Optimization. This article helps you to have a sneak peek into 2018 picture of SEO.
Talking about 2017, a great shift from desktop to mobile was seen. Mobile became the primary device to access websites. More searches were reported on mobile than on desktop. As we proceed to 2018, mobile companies are coming up with different improved sets and more configurations. It makes it easier for users to crawl things easily. A Shift from the desktop to mobile raised the necessity to make mobile friendly websites. A shift to mobile from desktop does not make it different for the SEO functionality. To increase traffic on your website, one has to implement some of the practices.
Here are some of the SEO practices that would help boost your website in 2018:
1.) Check Indexing
You should keep checking the number of site’s pages indexed by search engines. Ideally, the number is supposed to be largely proportional to the total number of pages on your site, minus the ones that are not be indexed. If the gap is bigger than what you expected, you need to review your disallowed pages.
2.) Important Resources should be Crawlable
If the important resources on the site are not crawlable, you are not going anywhere with your website. Sometimes, one is tempted to simply look through robots.txt, but often, it just inaccurate. It is just a way to restrict pages from indexing. In this case, you may want to use an SEO crawler to get a list of all blocked pages, regardless of the instruction found in the instruction. Basically, you have to make sure that the important resources on the website, that are required to be shown, are easily crawled.
3.) Optimize Crawl Budget
It is also important to optimize crawl budget. It is the number of a site’s pages that search engines crawl during a given period of time. You can optimize crawl budget with different online portals. Once you find out your crawl budget, you might look for a way to increase it. The key factor on which Google assigns crawl budget are (1) the number o interlinks to a page and (2) its number of back links from other sites. You can make the changes accordingly.
4.) Audit Internal Links
Auditing internal links is also one of the most important things to do when it comes at increasing the ranking of the site. You need to check the following things while auditing internal links:
Click Depth: You need to the structure of the site as shallow as possible. It means the most important pages should no more than three clicks away from the home page.
Broken Links: You must also pay attention to the broken links. These confuse visitors and eat up pages.
Redirect Links: Taking a visitor through a number of redirects will negatively affect load time and crawl budget.
Orphan Pages: These pages are hard to find for visitors and search engines.
5.) Review Sitemap
Importance of sitemap cannot be ignored. They tell the search engines about the site structure and also help them discover new content faster. So, you should timely review your sitemap. It should be fresh always, meaning you need to keep updating it. Cleanliness matters and thus you should remove garbage (non-canonical pages, 4XX pages and redirect URLs) from it. Google limits its sitemap crawls to 50,000 and thus size also matters.
6.) Improve Page Speed
Page speed is Google’s top priority. It is also an important ranking factor. Also, when the page takes time to load, no visitor would like to stay on it. So, you are advised to pay attention to the speed of the page. A faster page is better, no matter how you measure it.
7.) Mobile Friendly
As discussed above in the article, getting mobile friendlier is the basic need of today. The shift from desktop to sell phone has made it compulsory for website to become mobile friendly. So, become mobile friendlier and be found.
So, if you want to push your business to new heights in 2018, you should surely go for these practices. These are the best practices to be followed in order to boost the ranking of your site. Most of all, remember that that SEO requires consistency and patience.
