SEO has become a complicated field, and many subjects need to be considered. In this article, we are going through what we believe are the most important ones that you need to consider if you want to rank on search engines in 2019.
1. Crawlable and accessible URLs
If you want to rank the first thing you need to do is allow Googlebot’s spiders to be able to visit your page and understand what is the content there. That is the most critical thing as, without this, all the other tips are useless.
- Do your keyword research
You need to know what are the keywords that you are trying to rank for. In this way, you can tailor the content so to answer those questions that are asked to search engines. For example if you are a website like CasinoBiggestBonus that has a selection of casino bonuses to offer to readers you might want to target keywords like Casino Bonuses, Best Casino Bonuses and so on.
Regardless of your niche, it would help if you came up with a primary keyword and some secondary related keywords that all share the same searcher’s intent. You can then optimise your content and site to target those primary and secondary keywords.
- Investigate the search results to find what Google believes to be relevant to the searcher
It is essential to see what Google currently think to be suitable for search queries that you are trying to target. In this exercise, you will need to figure out the searcher’s intent and also what content is required and even if there are gaps to fill in the area.
- Create quality content that will help searcher’s goal
What the content should do is to serve the searcher’s goal and resolve their tasks. We need quality content that will do this better than all the competitors on page one because Google will be able to see if people are satisfied with the content on your page or not. If your content is not good enough over time, Google will rank others sites able to answer searches queries better.
5. Publish well-written title tags and meta descriptions
You might be surprised, but Google still uses meta descriptions and title tags rather frequently. If you are looking at the search results, you will see that a high per cent is the actual meta description of the page that is being used by Google. Even the URL, despite being truncated in some cases, it is taken from the snippet. So the snippet is very important to reaching your SEO goals because it will influence how your site will display in search results: this is a golden opportunity to increase the number of clicks you will get from the impressions. It is your opportunity to say: ‘click on my listing instead of those of other guys’. If you can optimise this and yet offering compelling content, you can really prevail.
- Make smart use of primary, secondary and linked keywords
Google is going to look at your content and also at related keywords as a way to establish if your content is relevant to the searcher’s query. It is therefore crucial that you use text content as if you just put in visuals or videos or others format of content that Google can’t parse, it might not count. Text content made of relevant keywords is the way to prove Google you can answer searchers’ queries.
- Use rich snippets to enhance content
Even though this suggestion might not be for everyone, it should be used when possible. If you are presenting a recipe or if you are presenting travels or flights that can be displayed with a schema markup then you should take advantage of those opportunities.
- Speed is important
More and more people are using the internet through their mobile phones and for Google, it is essential that your website renders fast and it is secure. Google cares a lot about HTTPS, and surely the focus on increased security won’t go away in 2019. Top international sites like BBC and others have adopted for example AMP technology that renders content much faster on mobile devices by stripping out unnecessary code. You should consider using this technology too as it will give you extra visibility on search engines and especially on mobile searches.
- Find sites that will amplify your content and drive links
If you have great content, you have a great chance of getting this picked up by other sites and gain links back and mentions back to your site. If we retake a look at CasinoBiggestBonus.com, we can see that they are used as a point of reference by many in the industry thanks to their thorough review of bonuses and casino operators.