Gone are the days when bloggers used paid organic traffic on their website and made tons of money overnight. This does not happen anymore. Google is constantly updating its algorithm and websites using black hat techniques are being penalized. After the recent penguin update from Google, a lot of famous websites have been penalized by Google which have changed the way people used to think about SEO.
Few years ago, SEO was all about building backlinks using discussion forums and directory submission sites. Some webmasters would simply use traffic bots in order to get organic traffic on their website. But after seeing the recent updates from Google, webmasters need to adapt white hat SEO strategies that offer no risk of getting penalized. If you are running a professional blog and want to make money from it, here are some strategies to do SEO the right way:
SEO Strategies to Adapt in 2016
1. Make Your Website Responsive
Google released a major update named Mobilegeddon in 2015. According to Mobilegeddon, any website that does not have a mobile-friendly design by April, 2015 will suffer major decline in rankings in mobile searches. Now we are in 2016 and it is a must to have a mobile friendly website. It is important both for search engines and readers. Having a mobile-friendly website design is definitely going to leave a positive impression on reader’s mind.
2. Get Powerful Backlinks, Drop Low Quality Links
Low quality backlinks don’t work anymore. In the past, webmasters used to build backlinks using discussion forums, site submission directories, etc. but in this present age, those links don’t work any more. All sites having such backlinks have already suffered penalties from Google.
It’s time to gain natural backlinks. Good content will automatically get you high quality backlinks. If you are producing great content, everybody will love to link to your content. One good way to get genuine backlinks is to contribute to high quality websites that are relevant to your niche. e.g. If you are a beauty blogger, find similar websites in your niche that accept guest posts. Your job is to find out high quality websites in your niche that accept guest posts. Once you have compiled a list of guest blogging sites, your job is to reach out to respective website owners offering your contributions as guest author. Make sure you produce good quality content for their website as no one like low quality content.
3. Focus on Social Media
Social Media has gained more prominence than ever with the start of 2016. Statistics show that 76% of marketers are using social media in order to promote their content and boost SEO of their website. Social signal is something that matters a lot for ranking high in Google search results.
Google uses almost 200 ranking factors in order to determine ranking of a website. Among many other important ranking factors, social signals are still considered a key ranking factor in determining a website’s rank. Google determines the number of Facebook shares, tweets, pins, etc. for a specific link. Therefore, it is important that you focus on social media marketing in order to get better search engine rankings.
Conclusion
SEO has become essential for every blog that wants to rank high in search engine rankings. Though proper SEO takes time, there is no doubt that the results are worth the wait. There is a famous saying:
What comes easy won’t last. What lasts won’t come easy.