Here’s our roundup of useful SEO articles for August 2015 – a bumper crop this month!
One of the two most notable articles this month is a great overview of SEO by Search Engine Land. Their “Periodic Table of SEO” outlines many of the factors important for SEO in 2015, along with how important each is. My key take-away here is to create unique textual content that’s valuable to your audience, make sure it’s easy for humans and computer to find, and make sure you have as many good quality links to it as possible. There’s obviously a lot more underneath that, it’s a good read.
Moz have come out with their 2015 SEO ranking factors, which is how they think ranking factors are going to change in the next year. The key things they’ve identified as becoming more important in 2015 are having a mobile friendly website, site usability and design, site speed, and https (which I think is a minor factor). Things predicted to stay as important are link relevance, social sharing, website URL structure, and links into the website. Paid links and the influence of anchor text in incoming links are expected to become less relevant. My key takeaway here is to make sure you optimize your website to make it easy for both humans to read/use and for computers to index, and not to downplay the importance of social media.
Here are some other interesting articles:
- Here’s another quick overview of how to ensure you rank well in Google.
- Cornerstone Articles, and why they’re important. These may be less relevant for photographers, but if you can be seen as an authority it can only help your rankings.
- Fixing other peoples 404 errors. This article talks about the importance of redirecting incorrect links to your website.
- Some advice on link building – short version is do not ask for or pay for links, at least not in any way Google can detect. Instead create content that people want to link to. More information can be found on alternative link building strategies here.
- Having a mobile friendly website is really key this year. There’s a theory that using responsive design will help your ranking. This is reasonably easy with WordPress – just purchase a properly designed, well optimized theme.
- It’s always helpful to have a reminder about the importance of website security. There’s one article on website security, plus another more focused on WordPress security.
As always we’re available to help with advice around website design, performance, and SEO. You can contact us here.