Google wants organic, high-quality content because that is simply what we want.  It’s really that simple.

The SEO path will forever be a long and winded, yet exciting path to follow. It’s always evolving and introducing new methods that can boost search engine rankings, and you truly need to stay current with the times in order to truly reach the pinnacle of SEO. Here is everything you need to be know to becoming a master at SEO today.

The Impending Doom of Penguin

One major thing you have to be aware of today is Google’s impending Penguin update. It’s an attack on spammy links, and as such, any websites that have poor quality links will not be rewarded. Ouch! Additionally, anything that seems unnatural will be viewed as questionable in the eyes of Google, and can do a significant amount of harm on your SEO and rankings.

The good news is that there are many services available online that analyze link quality, and can help reject any link(s) that could cause you problems.

Penguin works in correlation with Google’s Panda and Hummingbird updates in order to deliver more accurate and reliable results. Panda is all about rewarding high-quality, organic content, whereas Hummingbird is used to improve search engine’s capabilities, such as being able to understand words and semantics. However, no matter how in-depth your understanding is of these Google updates, you can never truly predict how such changes will affect each website.

SEO and Social Media

One of the most powerful marketing tools for the past several years, and very much so in 2016 is social media. It has introduced a new platform for business to interact with their customers, but what may surprise you is that it also has a large impact on SEO. While there is a vast array of social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin and Pinterest are amongst the most popular ones. Having likes, posts, shares, comments ad ultimately, followers can significantly expand your business within branding, and within search engine results as well.

Multi-Screen Marketing

Internet searches are increasingly being performed via mobile devices. As such, mobile optimization is no longer an option, but a necessity to becoming successful. It’s so important that companies that do not have a mobile optimized websites are likely to be penalized by Google. The key is to not only have multi-screen marketing, but to ensure that each page loads quickly. Since the average Internet user has a very short attention span, your website speed is crucial to ensure low bounce rates, as it can take mere seconds for customers to abandon a website because the page doesn’t load promptly.

Content Creation

Content is an incredibly important factor in order to reach the pinnacle of SEO, as it’s no longer a place to stuff keywords (and hasn’t been for quite some time). Instead, it’s all about quality over quantity.    Since Google’s algorithm is becoming even more intelligent, it will pick up poor quality content, and penalize the website in the meantime. Ensure that all content provided is valuable, engaging, useful and relevant to your viewers, and
Google will correlate with this. Additionally, longer content has been proven to be more beneficial than short, shallow pieces.

Voice Search

Many people are now starting to use voice searches as opposed to typing out queries. This is crucial to recognize because people using voice-related tools to search the Internet will do so in a manner as if they were talking to another person. Having a similar conversational tone within your content can bring a huge boost in traffic.

Click-Through Rates

Search engines have amazing capabilities that can track how many times a viewer clicks on a website from the search engine result pages, and then returns to look for another website within the same search. Ultimately, this tells Google that the first website clicked on did not have valuable information, which brought the viewer back to find one that does. Click-through rates could also be a strong indicator that said website is optimized for search engine optimization, but doesn’t follow in suit with high-quality content. It’s crucial to maintain a good CTR, and can easily be done with engaging content.

Track Your SEO Strategies

Everyone should be using Google Analytics to track the progress of their SEO tactics. You can instantly comparing before-and-after statistics, which then allows you to make adjustments and updates to your website to further your success. These kinds of comparisons allow you to see what changes may have contributed to a decreased traffic, high bounce-rate, etc. so you can make alterations to your SEO strategies as needed.

The bottom line is that Google wants quality over quantity. The trick to SEO is to truly be as genuine, engaging and unique as possible. Anything that appears to be a tactic in the eyes of Google will certainly be frowned upon. However, with these tips, you will be sure to reach the pinnacle of SEO in 2016.

If you would like more information on SEO as well as a free SEO analysis on your web brand visit us @britecode.io/marketing