4 SEO Tactics That Will Deliver Great Results in 2019 and Beyond

Search engine optimization, or SEO, remains one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways for companies to attract attention online. While there are other digital marketing options that are frequently worth considering, SEO is so fundamental that it is rarely wise to overlook it.

That said, the nature of SEO has changed significantly over the years, with the situation in 2019 being especially demanding of practitioners. A quick look at the four most potent techniques at the moment, though, will reveal there are plenty of effective ways of making progress.

An Evolving SEO Environment Still Harbors Plenty of Opportunities

The vast majority of all English-language SEO effort today focuses on the search engine operated by Google. Providers of SEO services in Singapore, the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries emphasize Google’s service because of the importance of English to commerce worldwide.

As such, tweaks Google makes to its search algorithms tend to receive the most attention, even to the point of eventually trickling down to other services. Over the years, the one constant has been the steadily decreasing effectiveness of the kinds of low-effort SEO tricks that used to be so common.

For example, Google’s 2012 Penguin update, for the first time began penalizing sites that were accurately identified as benefiting from spammy, artificial links. The company’s earlier “Panda” patch had already cut back drastically on the search results prominence of many so-called content farms.

As a result of developments like these, SEO in the modern age has become quite a bit more sophisticated and subtle than it used to be. Most of the crude, brute-force tactics that were formerly common and effective have been obsoleted, but there are plenty of others that still work and are sure to keep doing so.

The Four Most Powerful SEO Techniques of the Modern Era

While SEO specialists might need to work a little harder than in the past, leaders in the field are still producing results that wow their clients. The four SEO tactics that produce the most impressive results now are:

• Soliciting backlinks.

What made Google’s PageRank algorithm special when it was first introduced more than 20 years ago was how it used the presence of links to a page as an indication of quality and substance. Google has become a lot more discerning about the sources it trusts, but backlinks from authoritative, respected websites still boost the search results ranking of targeted pages significantly. Reaching out to other website owners to build backlinks is one of the most directly effective SEO tactics at the present time.

• Guest posting.

Offering to post for free on another website in exchange for a backlink can prove even more fruitful than simply asking for a link to be added gratis. In either case, the ultimate goal is the same, but one approach will frequently prove effective where the other fails.

• On-site content creation.

Even some highly successful SEO experts prefer not to spend much time soliciting links or looking into guest posting opportunities. An effective but more independent way to achieve the same sorts of results is to simply double down on content creation. Google’s stance has always been that useful, high-quality content will rank well by default, and its various updates over the years have made this claim less debatable.

• Improving site speed.

Finally, many sites rank lower in the search results than they could because of straightforward technical reasons. Google users enjoy using sites that load quickly, so it will always be wise to address any lack of speed. In fact, speeding up an overly slow site often proves to be the single easiest way to boost its search results positioning.

In addition to being consistently effective at the moment, these four SEO tactics also meet with Google’s approval to one degree or another. That makes them more likely than most others to remain effective well into the future.