Before sharing these amazing trends, I must point out two most commonly used SEO types that are gradually disappearing. These two search engine optimization types, called white hat and black hat, are basically used by most of the companies.
Black hat search engine optimization refers to the practices that are used to get higher rankings on search engines within short span of time and in an unethical manner. Some black hat techniques are:
- Keywords Stuffing
- Footer linking
- Local keyword spamming
- Cloaking
- Link Farms
- Doorway Pages
- Tiny Text, Hidden Text, and Hidden Links
- Duplicate Content or Mirror Site
- Blog Spam or Comment Spam
- Private Blog Networks
- Meta Tag/Description Stuffing
- Rich Snippet Markup Spam
Black hat SEO techniques are more risk oriented, and on many instances, Google has penalized or banned a lot of websites for that. If you try to attempt black hat technique, your website will not be ranked based on any keywords even if anyone searches with your domain name. This is certainly a moment of despair for any business, yet many companies and clients focus on incorporating black hat for instant benefits, which could be counterproductive.
Without a further ado, let’s talk about the SEO trends of 2019. These are some important factors you should be keeping your eyes on:
Technical SEO
Are you in the know how of which technical issues are affecting your website’s ranking? There are various technical SEO issues that require your attention, failing which your online presence can take a hit. As a matter of fact, these issues can cause a direct or indirect impact on search engine crawling, indexing and ultimately: ranking. Thus, the fixes can help improve your site as a whole, rather than just isolated pages. Here are some points you need to look at:
- Duplicate Content
- Title Tag Issues
- Meta Descriptions
- Broken internal and external links
- HTML and Text ratio
- Missing Alt Tags on the images
- Uses of 302 Redirects Instead of 301
- Multiple versions of homepage
- Soft 404 Errors
- txt file
- Web Pages not indexing issue
- Canonical tag implementation issue
- XML Sitemaps status
- Page Size
- Internal linking and poor navigation structure of the website
- Crawl Errors
- Schema markup
- I hope you will review these technical SEO issues and develop your SEO audits to tackle some most important issues and opportunities.
- Content Optimization and Marketing
Search engines like Google strive to provide users with useful and most relevant content. For this reason, content optimization becomes a highly important factor because a good optimized and user friendly content always ranks higher on the searches. Effective web content optimization focuses on using very specific keywords in very specific places to send the strongest possible signals for that keyword target. It is important to understand user search intent and optimize content based on LSI and Google Hummingbird algorithm. The content relevancy and length is also important for the website. Make sure your website is delivering good quality of content to users as well as search engines. Google answer box is the example of the conversational search, it is all about understanding the intent of user searches.
Domain Age, URL and Authority
In 2017, Google’s John Mueller said in the Twitter that the domain age alone is not important for search ranking, but if you will review and analyze the search results, you will find “domain age”, “URL”, and “authority” are in fact three main metrics for ranking on the top of Google. For example, in websites like Entrepreneur, Forbes, INC, you can see how old these domains, website and authorities are; what quality of content they have and what their URL structure is. You can check domain authority or page authority with Open Site Explorer.
The search trend is changing as compared to last year, and now it seems Google is paying so much attention to these parameters, especially domain authority.
Social Signals
The question is, will Google ever include more social media signals in its ranking algorithm or not? There are many conversations among SEO experts on this topic. But I think content engagement and social sharing will be another tends to watch out for in 2019. The reason is more social sharing and engagement mean, improved referral traffic, increased backlinks of your website, and reduced bounce rate of your webpage. And these are the signals of the ranking. Signals are things Google uses to help determine how to rank web pages. For example, it will read the words on a webpage, so words are a signal. If some words are in bold, that might be another signal that’s noted. Also, Social proof content adds authority to your content by showing that the content is valuable and trustworthy.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Google had added Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) function in Google search console and AMP page show up for mobile users and allow accessing the page fast and boosting ranking on Google searches, especially for news and articles websites. The main questions is that do we need to create AMP pages or just improve the speed and UI of the existing responsive or mobile website. The importance of the both pages are same, both pages are targeting mobile users but the result of the AMP pages are much better than the mobile or responsive pages, the download speed and UI of the AMP page is good. This will be a new battle in 2019, we have to track what’s going with AMP.