Be at the forefront of SEO in 2018!

In order to ensure a natural referencing of quality and to aim at the first positions, Google has developed, since 2010, nineteen algorithms each with their own characteristics. These are listed in a referencing charter defined by Google and updated every year: Google indexing.

In 2018, Google announces that it will pay particular attention to the quality of the content, as well as to the means of search. The mobile is becoming increasingly important and is also changing the behavior of SEOs.

The quality of the content is now the central element to obtain a good natural referencing on Google. While the editorial rules, which allow you to maximize the natural referencing of a site, remain unchanged, the positioning of pages in the results obtained is no longer the same. Google has developed increasingly subtle algorithms, capable of detecting the relevance of information in order to evaluate the positioning on search engines. Even if quantity is an element that retains its importance, quality is becoming a central element of web referencing.

The big difference concerns the content. From now on, it is no longer enough to simply position keywords in order to obtain a good natural referencing. When searching on Google, the search engine examines the entire semantic field of a page. This is how relevance is defined. The principle is to structure the pages and content by going from the general to the particular. A rich lexical field, referring to multiple references is to be favored. In order to facilitate the moment of writing, take the time to write an editorial plan, think about the questions that may be asked by Internet users.

The theme of the content is also important. If you still want to build your text on the basis of a single keyword, it is possible to start from a general idea and add keywords of the same family in the text.

In SEO, you can choose to use the silo strategy. It consists in building a website according to themes and subjects. Your theme must be broken down into several categories. For example, your site on walking shoes can be organized as follows, high mountain, hiking, trekking, etc. This technique can be further optimized by inserting links to obtain a semantic relationship.

Different tools can help you adapt to this new semantic trend. Having become an essential step in SEO, semantic referencing makes it easier to insert keywords that could be used by Internet users. You will thus benefit from crawl indexing at the moment when Google will give your site as a reference in your domain. Regarding your old texts, it is better to rework them and add additional keywords. We also recommend writing relatively long texts and inserting videos.

Quantity is also important. The more complete the article is, the more a page increases its chances of being in the top positions. It is therefore necessary to find a good balance between quantity and quality. Other criteria should also be taken into account to increase the result of its SEO, such as improving the meta description tag that promotes clicks and wide sharing on social networks, in order to obtain a multitude of sources at the origin of the movement on the content of a page.

One of the great innovations of the coming months is certainly related to vocal SEO. The development of new SEO tools is moving towards voice search and mobiles allowing the use of voice aids such as Siri or Google Now.
The importance of video SEO also has its role to play. The 2018 trend is to promote the use of voice queries on Google SEO. Google’s latest statistics show that one in five searches is currently done via voice search. And this trend is further reinforced by the release of PDAs, such as Google Home. Taking into account voice SEO is therefore becoming necessary if we want to maximize the content of a page. The thing to take into account is that you don’t speak as you write. In addition, voice searches tend to be more in the form of a question than in the form of keywords. This evolution should lead Google SEO to focus on keywords in the form of a question and on informal language, i.e. on how to communicate in an everyday discussion. The latest studies conducted by Google in Great Britain show that 42% of respondents regularly use a voice search function, compared to 25% four years ago. Video is an element not to be neglected.

Video is an important element to consider. A well referenced video can have an excellent reach. It has a strong power of attraction, which is essential in promoting content. Sharing videos within the content of a page helps maintain public interest and develop links with your YouTube channel. More than half of the people who watch a video will talk about it or share it with their contacts. In France, YouTube brings together more than four million Internet users on average per day and more than twenty-three million per month on computers. YouTube is the most used search engine after Google. Net linking is an essential element of natural referencing in 2018.

In view of the growth of this segment, Google should further increase the emphasis on the mobile at the expense of the desktop. This is above all in terms of ergonomics and the display of sites on smartphones. In the near future, the mobile version will be analyzed first by Google to rank the sites. Of course, the desktop version will be maintained but will be an alternative option.

In order to prepare for mobile first indexing, Google has recently published an article that presents the main elements to be taken into account.

For the year 2017, in France, more than 37.5 million people will be connected to the Internet from their smartphone. This corresponds to 67% of French people over the age of 11, i.e. one French person in two. Given that the number of people surfing on mobile phones is growing, Google has developed the Mobile First index project. It is an alternative way to analyze a website for Google. It is primarily the mobile version of a page that is taken into account, before the desktop version. In case the site is responsive and the smartphone version displays content similar to the desktop version, the SEO is positive. Google says that sites that are not yet mobile friendly will not be penalized. The implementation of the mobile first index algorithm will be as smooth as possible. Currently, we observe that the same search performed on smartphone or computer does not give the same results 80% of the time. This is not negligible.

It is very likely that MPA will play an important role for Mobile First. It is essential to get a good positioning on Google’s mobile search results page. It has been observed that websites with MPA pages get better results on SERPs obtained on the desktop.

The use of mobile is increasing for online searches. It is also important to look for ways to improve the loading speed of your pages. A page that loads quickly is much more popular with Internet users, and therefore with Google. That is to say that a user considers a page to take a long time to load, if it is displayed after more than three seconds. The loading speed of your site can be responsible for a penalty by Google. As a web agency, Habefast accompanies you and carries out a complete SEO audit of your website.