2018 SEO Points to Consider
I have learned a lot through this forum over the years. I thought I would try to help out a bit and hand out some free advice. Remember advice is worth what you pay for it though... :-)
G has been refining their algo as we all know. This happens constantly, but there are some points that are pretty clear. Taking advantage can help, and not addressing can hold you back.
1. Mobile friendly. Yes, WP ad other CSS has moved to mobile friendly by default. However, did you know that G has moved to mobile index? i.e. mobile index. Now is the time to make certain you are mobile friendly. If you are not, you are gong to drop in the index and there is nothing you can do about it. G even has a tool in WM to test your site.
2. Linkless SEO. I have been doing this for about 4 months as an experiment. It works really well. So in addition to my PBN network which I have mentioned in the past, I do a lot of brand building now. My idea was to vastly inflate the content and audience for my brand. Not to drive traffic or seo via links, but rather the theory was that the cloud of content would create value without any links. The answer is, it does, big time. And the beauty is that there is ZERO risk as you are not linking to your MS. Turns out G now associates mentions and linkless content as a link. :-) And SER is the perfect tool for this strategy.
3. Featured snippet. Do any G search. Top of the page are featured snippets. Grab a spot and conquer your seo. Adding structured data in your code can get you one of these crazy valuable potion zero spots.
4. Voice search is exploding. Long tail kw's are typical of voice.
5. https G has clearly mentioned that they prefer https on sites and are going to punish publishers in 2018 who are not https. Very easy fix.
Hope some or all of this helps.
G has been refining their algo as we all know. This happens constantly, but there are some points that are pretty clear. Taking advantage can help, and not addressing can hold you back.
1. Mobile friendly. Yes, WP ad other CSS has moved to mobile friendly by default. However, did you know that G has moved to mobile index? i.e. mobile index. Now is the time to make certain you are mobile friendly. If you are not, you are gong to drop in the index and there is nothing you can do about it. G even has a tool in WM to test your site.
2. Linkless SEO. I have been doing this for about 4 months as an experiment. It works really well. So in addition to my PBN network which I have mentioned in the past, I do a lot of brand building now. My idea was to vastly inflate the content and audience for my brand. Not to drive traffic or seo via links, but rather the theory was that the cloud of content would create value without any links. The answer is, it does, big time. And the beauty is that there is ZERO risk as you are not linking to your MS. Turns out G now associates mentions and linkless content as a link. :-) And SER is the perfect tool for this strategy.
3. Featured snippet. Do any G search. Top of the page are featured snippets. Grab a spot and conquer your seo. Adding structured data in your code can get you one of these crazy valuable potion zero spots.
4. Voice search is exploding. Long tail kw's are typical of voice.
5. https G has clearly mentioned that they prefer https on sites and are going to punish publishers in 2018 who are not https. Very easy fix.
Hope some or all of this helps.
Comments
1. I HAVE TO do CSS stuff this week. And look into the AMP and alternative image size, also.
2. Good to see G making sense; it should be about branding!
3. Again, have to read up on this. Was going to get a Fvr service, just to see how someone GOOD at it does it. (But how do I know who's doing it correctly?)
Maybe a good idea would be to look on "example sites" as well?
4. Yup. "Alexa!" and "Hey Googhle" are words spoken countless times each day, preceding all sorts of odd queries, I'm sure. ("Hey Googhle, where did I put my wallet and all that cash I had on my dresser? G:
5. Do you mean on the entire domain??
"Hope some or all of this helps." -@viking
Yes; some or all of it was helpful.
2. Linkless SEO. What quality is your content? Do you allow Google to measure its engagement(do you use Google Analytics)? If so it may be Google just make good content popular without links at all, this is what I found true.
https://www.websitemagazine.com/blog/mobile-first-indexing-officially-arrives
Wow. My sub to SEMrush ran out. This is where I used to check this.
If a site ranked well on the regular G index, but was low on mobile, why would this be?
Let's further say the page checked out in the G tester as mobile-friendly.
Hmm...
"If your site is not 'mobile' optimized, you may face challenges in the near future."
I have a lot of work ahead of me; just crap-work I've been delaying getting to for waaay too long.
It'll feel good to finally be done with it. I do have to look everything over, especially older sites. Some are sooo bad, def need to be re-done ASAP with this new news!!
Site speed parameters <1 second. My new one is 562m/s and G loves it.
Linkless or brand shoutouts effectively? Hmmm, don't like this but I suppose this is easy to spam the living hell out of it. Any further reading or proof of this? I tested this a year or two ago but on a brand that was a partial keyword.
So the basic premise is that if you sell a widget, you are competing against everyone else who sells the widget. Like we all do, we lose that battle 100% of the time to someone who has better resources, traffic, etc. Everyone bangs out seo for 'widget name' and all the long tail variants. Like Lemmings we all line up and bang out collectively millions of links. In my world, the widget I sell is my widget, against other people's widgets. Those people have very deep pockets, much deeper than mine.
So, I came up with the realization that I have been doing seo all wrong for years. I will never be able to out-anything those competitors. Even with the awesome SER at hand, it just won't matter to G in the long run. So a few months back, I stopped worrying about it and rolled out my linkless efforts. I hand-write the content with hand-written spintax. The articles are only about my 'brand', not necessarily the 'widget.' I just let it run + run, creating thousands of 2.0's talking about my brand. The beauty here is what we can all appreciate, is that software driven efforts vastly outpace human efforts of my competitors. The landscape is leveled for production. And since linkless content cannot create a MS penalty it is all down to creating lots of unique, compelling content.
So far the results have been above average. Clearly it will take me more months ahead to knock off global corporates, but I am seeing upward trending on all kw's that I couldn't budge with traditional linking.
I don't think it is a good strategy for C+B business models, but for MS long-term strategy this seems to be the way forward imo. All indications from the search engines also seem to support the strategy.
Here is some interesting content in support of the strategy. Cheers!
https://searchengineland.com/use-brand-mentions-seo-linkless-future-link-building-290344
Use plaintext domain name ?
@Kaine I am only doing one tier. I actually look at it more as a 'cloud' than a tier though as I am after a much bigger level of 'brand' content than I currently have. That is my primary objective. I suppose I could always circle back at some point and insert T1 links to those 2.0's that stick in the index. Haven't thought about that yet...but since G is giving juice for linkless content I don't see where it would make sense to risk it.