Top 7 SEO Rules for 2017

These are the top 7 SEO rules that you should take into consideration in order to improve your rankings in Google search engines.

We all want better search rankings. Organic search traffic leads to more business ultimately.

SEO is changing regularly and if you don’t follow the rules, your site can be penalized.

Rule #1: Content, content, content is King!

Please pay attention to Google's Mission Statement:

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"

We can no more fool Google trying to have a page with a lot of links and no rich content. So it is very important to offer useful information to your readers in order to achieve rankings in search engines.

Remember that all that Google wants, and basically any search engine wants, is to offer value to the person who is going to a search engine looking for an answer to his/her question.

We have our website set for a purpose, maybe to sell a product or a service, or anything, but the conversion should always remain as a byproduct of your content.

Focus on offering the best content possible to your readers, then ranking and traffic comes as a result of your intention.

Once you are clear about content, we move on the next 4 most important rules/steps to follow, some of these are tech related but easy to implement.

Rule # 2: Earn Google’s trust

In order to achieve top rankings you have to work your way out for Google to trust you.

And how do you get Google to trust you? It’s not an easy task definitely. It takes time to gain Google’s trust, specially if you are new, you have to apply the principle of patience.

It is a matter of time, the best practise is to focus on the rest of the rules and don’t be disappointed , do a good job with a honest intention of serving your audience.

This is my case and i have long term view, i will focus on other aspects, i intend to take baby steps towards my goal.

Rule # 3: Age matters

The age of you site is more important than it’s looks. You may have a great design but google is not much bothered about it.

And how much time are we talking about? We are talking for a minimum of 6 to 12 months. I personally think it makes sense. There is no hurry!

What do I mean really when I talk about age? I’m talking about the indexed age of your site, its content and the links that are pointing to it.

Be consistent in your posting. Google is constantly crawling your site and watching it’s behaviour. Please avoid practises like posting lot of content for a few weeks and abandoning your site for few other weeks. Work on your site with regularity, Google is watching your activity.

Rule # 4: Size Really makes a difference

Google hates thin content. Short content is many times considered short of value. It is not very difficult to understand that a page/post with less than 300 words is poor in content right? Size also competes so imagine if your article has 500 words, and your competitor has an article about the same topic with 2000 words, he has all the chances of winning the ranking game.

If you test this point, you will often notice that the top rankers are huge with their content!

Of course, your goal should not only concentrate on size, but on a good quality content combined with it’s length. In two words, offer rich value!

There’s an enormous difference between being a great writer and being a great SEO writer. The latter requires the former as a prerequisite, but it’s a far more developed skill. Sure your prose needs to be on point. But if you’re serious about search engine optimization in the slightest, the content also has to be specifically tailored for a given topic or keyword.

Rule #5: Use Keywords without overdoing it

Great SEO content has a lot to do with keywords. Google aims for rich content for the public, content for real human beings but you also have to keep in mind applying keywords to your content thinking about search engines like Google. Just don’t go crazy about it or you may be penalized. Keep a balance between both.

Your aim is to make your content keyword-centric, but don’t bombast the exact keywords over and over again. You want your content to be natural and organic without feeling the need to force keywords.

With time you will gain practise and you will ba able to do it effortlessly.

Stick to creating amazing content that delivers enormous amounts of value, and is also lengthy enough to clearly convey the purpose or the answer to the questions that people are seeking, you’ll win the ranking game over time.

Rule #6: Build links the right way

You want people that are linking to you from all over the world, but you also want to ensure that relevant, high-quality content is linking to you rather than low-quality garbage.

Building a healthy link profile is a difficult thing. If you focus your efforts on great content, those links will come naturally over time. It might take a very long time, but they’ll eventually come.

You may apply some of these techniques:

Anchor text linking (in-text links): Anchor text links are simple links that appear within the content.

The anchor text linking strategy is mostly used when you’re looking to rank for a particular keyword. You can use your target keyword as anchor text, but to be on the safe side and avoid penalties, mix it up with generic keywords.

For example, if your primary keyword is digital smartwatch reviews, when building your links from another site, link naturally like this: find the best smartwatch reviews, top smartwatch brands, etc.

Image links: You can also use images to build links when you write posts or guest posts.

Here’s how you do that in WordPress. When you are ready to add an image to a post, type the keyword that you would like to use as your anchor text in the “Alt Text” box. Images are indexed by Google and that means you will get a link back to your site.

For Google, what other people say about you is much more important and relevant than what you say yourself.

Rule #7: Mobile enabled

The trend is that people are navigating more and more through their mobiles/tablets. Mobile searches are now outpacing desktop searches, and Google is extremely focused on mobile.

By building a mobile-first design, you’re looking into the future and ensuring that you’re conforming to Google’s wishes.

Those wishes are steeped in reality because mobile devices have become so important in our lives, that you simply can’t overlook mobile usability when thinking about SEO, especially when talking about SEO for the future.

THAT’S ALL GUYS!

To your success!

Maan