2018 Checklist To Rank In SEO

If you are not one for following trends, then get this: your website isn’t going to get much traffic this year. Why? Well, every year Google updates its algorithm. If you are looking at gaining more traffic, then here is your 2018 checklist to rank in SEO brought to you by TribeLocal.

Optimizing the Meta Title and Meta Description

Meta titles and meta descriptions still hold quite some significance, even in 2018. To sufficiently optimize your title, it’s always best to begin it with the keyword or key-phrase you are trying to rank for. As for the meta description, you can use LSI keywords, that is, variations of your primary keyword. For example, if your keyword is ‘internet technologies’, an LSI keyword would be ‘technologies of the internet’.

Another neat trick is to use emoticons in your meta description. Yes, you read it right. An emoticon will increase the CTR. Greater CTR means greater rank.

Don’t Try Too Hard!

Google hates it if you make it look like you worked to bring in search engine optimization into your website. It always has to read naturally, be informative and engaging. If you are stuffing keywords, having too many LSI variants, paying too much importance to heading sizes, etc., a high rank is one thing you will not achieve. It’s best to always write your content naturally and then think about optimizing the post. Tweak it here and there, and you should be good to go.

Also remember, don’t begin optimization immediately after building your site. Google bots will definitely pick it up as you try to rank higher. Take it slow. Optimize your website gradually.

Funny, Engaging And Informative Content

Make your content engaging and fun to read. Why? Because, this year, Google has increased the importance of one of its metrics – the time people spend on a page increases its rank. And so, it’s more imperative than ever to write engaging, informative and natural content – something that will actually help the reader.

You can try using images, videos and pop-ups, anything that would attract the reader.

Keyword Research

Okay, just because keywords have lesser importance now, it doesn’t win you brownie points if you ignore them altogether. You still need to do sufficient keyword research. An important resource for the same is KWFinder.

Try to rank for keywords or key-phrases that don’t have much competition. Target long-tail keywords and modifiers. Modifiers are words such as complete, beginner’s, best, how-to, etc. Don’t place too much importance on a single keyword. Find your primary and secondary keywords, and include them in a few posts.

Here’s a tip: don’t update posts containing the same primary keyword immediately one after the other. Don’t forget – keep it natural. Remember to perform keyword-research for every post.

Site Navigation and Technical SEO

The Google Bot is going to rank your website and it uses web-crawlers to find your page. You are not going to fare well if your content isn’t easy to navigate through. Hire an SEO techie who can create intelligent sitemaps that Google will find easy to index.

Interlinking and Back-linking

All the funniest content in the world will not help you rank well if you don’t interlink pages on your site or link to a high-ranking website. Try to link at least one or two other pages of your website per post. For out-bound links, you can include 4-6 per page. A good tool to help you with this is Ahrefs.

Social Media Has Seeped into The SEO World Too

Google gives special importance to pages that are shared on social media. The number of shares, likes and comments do matter. You can make social media sharing easy with this super cool WordPress plugin.

Loading Time

Loading time has special importance in 2018. Remember this, the more the number of users bouncing of your page, the lesser your website is going to rank. If your URL doesn’t have HTTPS at the beginning, then you can forget about ranking high in 2018.

Also See: GOOGLE SEO RANKING FACTORS 2018

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR SEO RANKING WITH A WEEBLY SITE

HTTPS is known to be safer and more secure. What’s more, Google has made it mainstream, especially when it comes to SEO. And don’t forget your mobile domain. The faster your mobile site, the greater your number of visitors are going to be.

Updating Content Regularly

There is something called a freshness score. You can attain a higher freshness score if you have a blog or a news section wherein you update new information or posts on the latest trends. Pay special attention to the holiday season.

To sum it up, SEO isn’t dead, yet. Follow this 2018 checklist to rank in SEO and you will soon begin to see more visitors turning to users. Cheers to gradually moving to the top!