Semalt: Trends In Web Promotion That Will Affect The Future
Since 1998, website promotion in the search engines and especially in Google has gone through many upheavals and severe shocks to which Google gave "easy" and nice names such as Penguin, Panda, and May day just to name a few of them.
As you probably remember (and if you don't, then I'll remind you) in the early days of Google and until about 2007, the promotion of a website was very easy and accessible to everyone.
More than once I have wondered when this period when it was possible to cheat/work on Google with such ease will end. Until when will Google let this celebration take place? It was clear to me that Google could do more, much better.
First of all, from the very beginning, Google laid the foundations for web promotion that we see changing before our eyes, but apparently, they did not have the required resources ( web hosting, computing power) to implement. Today, they have.
The period of the classic or traditional promotion is over. Then, marketers and website promoters understand that:
- SEO is not just about writing a headline. It is important, but it is certainly not everything.
- Building backlinks in a "stupid" way will no longer do their site any good. On the contrary, massive building of worthless links can cause Google to penalize the site!
- The behaviour of the customers on the site determines a lot and a customer who comes from Google and leaves the site indicates to Google what he/she thinks about such a site. Abandonment is not considered a positive signal, to say the least.
The new directions or trends in web promotion are mobile compatibility, security, quality content, and natural links.
And now in detail!
Mobile compatibility
The number of your customers who have a mobile device in their hands is increasing. Websites that are not mobile-friendly will disappear because they will no more have the right to exist.
The customers who browse using a mobile device and arrive at a website that is not mobile-friendly, abandon it. They don't have time to start and tweak the site, expand and reduce, or move left and right. They will abandon. For them, it was a bad experience and they will try not to return to such a site again. Even from Google's point of view, abandonment does not indicate a good user experience, the opposite is true.
Google has been very active on this issue because it sees the growing numbers of mobile surfers and a different, extremely slow pace of mobile-friendly websites:
Google allows anyone to check for free whether their site is mobile-friendly. The test also shows what needs to be done to fix it, if necessary.
Google tested a number of options to signal to surfers who are looking for a mobile-friendly result. It sometimes displayed a mobile device icon, sometimes it was a caption on the side of the search results.
Within the Search Console, the webmaster tool Google Search Console or in its former name: Google Webmaster Tools, a special section was dedicated to showing how website pages are optimized for Google.
At conferences around the world where Googlers appear on stage as lecturers, they talk about... mobile sites.
Content quality
Companies that put emphasis on content marketing are the ones that will see success. While the technical tactics for promotion in the search engines are still relevant, the search engines and Google in mind, cherish/value websites that publish quality content that their customers want, and on a regular basis.
There is a lot of speculation and also myths about the way Google determines the quality of content, but it is clear that the content should be valuable to the audience to which it is directed, unique, relevant, fresh and rich in media.
A question I get asked a lot is about the length of an article. Those who do not like to read claim that it is enough to create a short content of one or two paragraphs and I say that you should write more and this for several reasons:
- Writing the content is for the customers to build authority, professionalism and trust in their eyes. It's hard for me to understand how you can build trust and authority in a short text. In 450 words or less, how can you position yourself as an expert in your field, can someone trust you?
- If the content is written in an interesting, unique way, such that one thing leads to another, then there is no problem reading it even if it is long. If, in addition, the content is written like a story, like an article in a magazine, then customers will read it to the end.
- Studies show that the results in the first 3 places in Google content contain over 2,000 words, each.
- Other studies show that comprehensive content gets more shares and likes on social networks because the readers feel that the person who wrote the article invested!
Site speed
A website should be fast and load quickly. Internet surfers do not have time to wait for the site to finish loading and if it takes more than a few seconds, they close the site and move on to the next site, and there is no shortage of such.
Surfers who use the Google search engine want the sites they reach from Google's search results to be at least as fast as the Google site loads and at least as fast as Google gives them an answer. This is a big challenge because Google usually provides an answer within half a second.
Google wants to provide its customers with a great browsing experience and knows that speed is important in creating a great browsing experience. The site should be fast. To this end, Semalt created a very versatile tool called the Dedicated SEO Dashboard. In fact, this tool is equipped with several advanced features to successfully optimize and promote any site. Among its functions is the site Page speed analyzer, thanks to which any website owner can check the speed of his/her website. The result is given out of 100 possible points.
The comments in this tool are mainly technical recommendations for the site owner to pass on to his or her development manager, but there are also things you should know. One of them is the size of the image: the rule is to load an image in the size it will be displayed.
Since a picture taken on an iPhone or Android is a picture whose width is 3264×2448 and weighs 3.3 MB, it is clear that such a size is not necessary. The users' screens have a maximum width of 1,920 with most of them using a smaller width, what's more, the image on the website displayed horizontally does not cover the entire screen from right to left.
An image with a width of 3264 points is not required when it will be displayed on the site with a width of only 600 or maybe 900 points. Images with large dimensions cause the file to be large in volume and this slows down the loading speed.
Beyond the instructions for handling images, this tool provides business owners with precise instructions on what to do to make the website faster, and in this regard: the faster the better, and unfortunately, there is no single, quick and easy solution suitable for all websites.
Secure site
When Google revealed that it secures websites with a protocol known as SSL, there were mixed opinions in the internet marketing community.
There is still no clear evidence that a secure site (a site whose prefix is HTTPS and not HTTP) will be promoted above its competitors, but Google accelerates the delivery of messages to website owners and encourages them to switch to browsing in a secure mode and also sends messages using the Google GSC webmaster tool on various security issues.
These actions indicate that in the future Google will reward sites that emphasize the security of the users on the site, and I must again point out that no unequivocal evidence has yet been found that this is happening today.
Summary
The main trends in web promotion are content, mobile and speed, but they are not the only parameters. Google itself admits that there are more than 200 different parameters. It is worth mentioning parameters such as signs from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, website surfers' behaviour (abandonment percentages, dwell times, the average number of pages viewed per visit) and more.
To continue to win Google's love, you have to act in the best interest of the customers. Google doesn't ask for a fast site because that's how it feels like it. It asks for a fast site because it thinks of its customers who will soon be (or won't be) your customers.