Ranking on page one in 2018

We’re all excited for the new opportunities 2018 is going to bring but when it comes to SEO and your website are there any major changes you’ll need to be prepared for in 2018?

The fundamental elements of SEO will stay the same in that you’ll need to put in consistent effort into your website and SEO tactics to ensure your site is being crawled and indexed on a regular basis for the right keyword terms.

Some basics that will continue to be important for 2018:

  • Site age: Like a fine wine that only gets better with age, the older your site is, the better ranking the search engines will give to it.
  • Site authority: Your site’s authority will continue to be an important factor for your ranking and your authority can be improved by finding quality backlinks and linking to other quality sites from your own website and making sure your website’s content has E.A.T. (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)
  • Site content: Google favors fresh, quality content on your site so you’ll want to make sure you’re regularly updating your site or adding new pages.

To make sure that your site is going into the new year optimized and ready for business, follow some of these SEO tips.

2018 SEO tips

  • Valuable and sharable: Your content needs to have E.A.T. and provide value for your site visitors. You can easily gauge if your site’s content is a hit with your visitors by seeing how and where it’s being shared on other websites or social media networks. You can also invest some time in creating different types of content, like blogs, itineraries, videos, or even audio files.
  • PageSpeed: Not that we want 2018 to go by quickly, but we do need your site to load quickly. PageSpeed continues to be an important component of your site’s overall ranking. Do regular audits of your site’s load time to make sure your images are fully optimized and that you don’t have any outdated plugins that are slowing it down.
  • Create a good experience: Make it easy for visitors to use your site with an easy-to-use navigation, breadcrumbs so people can figure out where in the website they are, and use tags or categories to keep your site’s content organized.
  • Use pop-ups sporadically: Pop-ups are a great way to get your visitors’ attention but can easily become an annoyance if you have too many or rely on them too frequently. Use them for important announcements like a flash sale or limited-time offer or around the holidays to promote gift certificates.
  • Have a healthy link profile: Your site should contain both internal and external links to improve your site’s authority. The search engine crawlers depend on these links to index your content and understand how it relates to other websites.
  • Build relationships: This year, focus on building relationships with your tourism boards, hospitality associations, and even online influencers to help amplify your site’s content and get new eyes on it.
  • Implement schema: If you’re not using schema, your site is missing out! Schema is a universal language that all the search engines use to understand sites better and display more information about them. You can easily add schema to highlight photos, star-ratings, or other important call-outs from your site. 

Published: December 20, 2017