Just having a website for your business isn’t enough to attract either interest or clients. You have to help ensure your site will actually be found quickly by those potential clients when they use different search engines. What’s the solution? SEO – search engine optimization!SEO is a combination of techniques that can be used to increase the visibility of a website or webpage to different search engines by making sure it gives those search engines the type of information they are looking for to give higher rankings in search results.As the web keeps getting bigger and more complicated, so do many other things that make SEO more complicated: new algorithms, voice-activated search, privacy protection laws and issues, and cookie policies. With all that, how can you keep up so your website is more likely to be found?
Search optimization: more than just key words
SEO involves several different criteria that take into account how search engine technology has evolved and the algorithms used.The smart use of key words to be found on sites and individual pages and applications is a first step in the right direction for good SMO, but it’s not everything. Several other principles should be applied along with the careful use and placement of key words. These include the structure of the text and effective use of titles and sub-titles with the key words, ensuring the pages can be loaded and viewed quickly, the integration of images and their described contents being optimized for SEO, ensuring quality content in words and visually, the age of the website, the quality of the links included, and more.
The most-used web platform in 2021 was TikTok, moving to the top of the list of Google products. What does this signify? Well, it means that text in webpages will have little significance for helping your business get noticed on Google’s top platform. However, hashtags will get noticed and are one of the ways to help make your content better known, but there are also other ways to improve your content on TikTok to increase your audience, such as using the TikTok analysis tool and cross-publishing items on other platforms.
The same vein, the growing use of smartphones and apps has transformed web search. Does SEO only mean thinking about the big search engines? Absolutely not! The mobile apps themselves are in competition. With the explosion of the number of apps available and the advent of APO – for app store optimization – it’s now the turn of “boutique” mobile apps to provide competition for the big traditional search engines.
The impact of updates to SEO algorithms
In another blog post, we discussed the impact of changes to algorithms on social media networks, but it’s also important to recognize how these changes impact SEO and therefore should influence the content of a website and how it is presented.
Changes to Google algorithms are made regularly and these can have an important impact on its search strategies and findings. Changes being seen in Google search findings are happening for a reason – their reference and indexing algorithms were updated in the summer of 2021 and again at the end of the year.
These changes impacted the principles of SEO by favouring established websites with a lot of user experience (including on mobile site versions). However, they have negatively impacted sites that are focused on the user experience so for them it is necessary to relearn the SEO rules… without really knowing them clearly. This is a headache for many, which increases the importance of calling on qualified professionals who know how and where to adequately respond.
Other trends also require web content creators to modify their SEO tactics, such as the growth of voice search (especially with Apple’s Siri) and the movement of more and more sites to a focus on mobile use.
As for Apple, the recent update to its iOS 14.5 operating system with new elements related to confidentiality remain in the sights of web specialists who continue their efforts to ensure the natural referencing of their sites during searches will not be terribly affected.
What does the future hold for SEO?
Many experts believe that the disappearance of third-party cookies will be one of the major developments related to SEO in 2022. These cookies are the “witnesses” that importantly allow targeting based on the data of users who visit a site.
The Apple iOS 14.5 update, the changes made by Google and the transition towards Web 3.0 demonstrate that not just cookies are likely to disappear in the near future, but that SEO could be completely transformed in an environment where everyone is the master of their own information and data. The measurement of the performance of media campaigns could be very importantly affected by these changes.
As well, there is a trend to optimizing media releases for use by the artificial intelligence systems that are replacing journalists in the creation of automated news for online media. For better or worse, we’re not far from the day when robots will be creating articles instead of humans!
Stay competitive!
Integrating SEO considerations into planning communications and marketing strategies is a winning way to start, but remaining on top of all the many and rapid changes in the field takes things to the next level! We’re always on the lookout for the latest trends and developments in SEO and can help you remain competitive to improve your SEO and guide you in the ever-evolving practices of web marketing.