What you need to know about SEO in 2017
It’s no secret that Google is who you want to be BFFs with when it comes to SEO. The search engine has 3.5 billions searches a day. But here’s an interesting fact: twenty percent of the searches performed on google are searches they’ve never seen before. Here are some other things we learned at an SEO class recently.
- Inbound links are still a huge factor. To find how many inbound links there are to your site got to Google and type in “site: yourdomain.com” This is terrific because you can find out where you competitors are getting inbound links from too using this method.
2. Do you know what AMP is? AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is an even more mobile friendly version of your website. There is a wordpress plugin you can use to install this on your site. WARNING: it will not show your ads on mobile (at least not for now) if you install it. So, if you have advertising on your site, I wouldn’t recommend adding this plugin just yet.
3. Page speed is an important factor. If you have large images that take time to load this will affect your page speed, so make sure to make your image sizes smaller (go by the guidelines of your theme). For example my featured image on my site uses a size of 700 x 394 pixels. You should aim for a page speed of 70 – 80.
4. Images naming is important. Image are a way that your site can be found too and helps in rank. Make sure to name your images with keywords instead of the detault that your camera names them. Use dashes instead of spaces in the names.
5. HTTS is or will soon become an important factor in your rank. So make sure to add this to your site. Most domain hosts will already have this and it is a free feature. You can use a service called Let’s Encrypt to make your site go from “HTTP” to “HTTPS”. Here’s a great resource on more information about this: gmm.to/sslmeetup.
What have we missed? What are you doing to increase SEO on your blog. We’d love to know!