
The Trick to SEO Is Not to Rely on Tricks


1. Organized Code
In addition to making your site look and sound great, you also have to look under the hood. Make sure you have well-organized code and semantic markup, which allows search engines and crawlers to better understand the content they're scraping. The average visitor won't know if these things are in place, but a web browser certainly will - landing you a top spot in their results.

2. Mobile Responsiveness
More than half of all online searches today come through mobile devices, which is why Google recently moved to mobile-first indexing. When they first rolled out this algorithm, many called it "mobilegeddon" because it caused such a dramatic shift in favor of mobile-friendly pages. And as time goes on, sites that fail to work on mobile devices may actually become obsolete. So, it's certainly something to address if you haven't already.

3. Secured Site
Another item for your checklist is having a site that's secure. In fact, if you haven't upgraded your site to full-time https, time is of the essence. Chrome, which is the leading web browser, has announced it will display a "not secure" tag on all http pages starting in July. With cybersecurity being such a huge concern, nothing could scare off customers faster than questioning their connection to your business.

4. Voice Search
With the rise of home assistants, such as Google Home and Alexa, more searches are being done through voice commands. In fact, one in five mobile search queries currently come from a voice search. As the accuracy of natural language searches improves, this trend will only continue to grow. The tip here is to make sure your site is written more like the way people talk, so your content can be easily discovered.

5. Quality Content
As Google continues to look for ways to eliminate fake news and content, it's more important than ever to be genuine and honest on your site. As you write content, always be thinking about your customer and how you can earn his or her trust. As you do this, you also gain the trust of search engines like Google, which is as good as gold.