For those of you in the know, SEO is a troubling issue. There are very few hard and fast rules. Even people who write terrible content with awful spelling and grammar mistakes are somehow ranking on top on Google. There are websites that only feature images that are somehow beating websites like Wikipedia, and there are blue-chip companies that are falling behind part-time bloggers. Plus, what appears to you on your computer may be completely different from what appears on the search engines of your friend down the street. Here are some SEO tips that still count in the year 2021.
Consider Using an SEO Company
Right out of the gate, let’s clarify what using an SEO company means, and what the dangers are. Modern SEO is not about backlinks, social media mentions, or keyword-stuffed content. It is all about how Google targets and monitors its audience and then uses big data to match people with the websites it thinks they will like. It is next-level machine learning on par with Skynet, and it cannot be exploited or manipulated. This means you need an SEO company that offers to make your website more popular, not one that promises to get your website on the first page of Google. You need a good and honest SEO agency that uses white hat methods to make your website more popular, rather than an SEO agency that promises you the earth but quotes a bunch of antiquated SEO methods as a means to get you there.
You Should Still Use Meta Tags
The use of meta descriptions and meta keywords is said to be useless these days, but it is just not true. Just because Google doesn’t rank your website based on meta-information doesn’t mean your meta tags are useless; they are like an extra coat of paint on your boat. Your boat doesn’t need an extra coat of paint, but it is better off with it than without it. Plus, there are still web crawlers, search engines, apps, online directories, and comparison websites that use meta information to rank and catalog their entries. In short, you should still use meta tags like meta descriptions, meta keywords, ALT text, and so forth.
Faster Loading Times Are Still Important
Despite Google trying to downplay specific rankable items, like rendering and loading speeds, the fact is that Google penalizes your website if it renders and loads too slowly. Rendering is the moment between clicking on a link and the white screen starting to load something. The loading time is the time it takes from when the load begins, to when the top third of the page is loaded (in general, there are several exceptions). Try Google’s own PageSpeed Insights test tool to see what is holding your website up.
Promote Your Website
A lot is said about natural and organic online growth, but the fact is that even the hardiest plants need a little fertilizer now and again. The problem only arises when people rely on promotion to power their website’s popularity, which is only really a plausible option for websites selling a product or service so that their sales can pay for their promotional costs. Check out websites on how to promote your website for free before you start paying for promoting your website, and if you do decide to pay to promote your website, then do it near the beginning to get the ball rolling, or find a way for your website to pay for its promotion through its own profits.
Forget Trying to Attract Backlinks
There is this odd misunderstanding that plagues the SEO world. Some people believe that you need to create content that other people will link to. That is why some SEO companies ask that you create Infographics and that you fill your website with quotable data, but this doesn’t affect your Google search engine ranking the way you think. Let’s say that your website offers solutions to very difficult programming problems or solutions to gaming bugs. In that case, Google would expect others to link to you in order to share the valuable information you provide. However, if you are selling toilet cleaners, Google doesn’t expect people to keep linking to you without a very good cause. Ergo, trying to attract backlinks, in this case, would be a pointless endeavour (at least in SEO terms, you may still receive a trickle of direct traffic from the links, so that is something).
Conclusion – Why Only in 2021?
There is no guarantee that the tips laid out in this article will be super relevant in 2022, or if by 2022 the whole Google infrastructure will have changed and a whole bunch of new tips will be needed. Yet, since the Hummingbird Update, the focus has been on big data machine learning over things like defined SEO rules. So, with that in mind, it is likely that the tips on this article about promoting your website and keeping it popular will still be relevant for many years to come.
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