Despite social media creeping up on search as a leading source of referral traffic, search engines are still the number one way a user will find your site on the web. At the same time, you know that you need to undertake certain optimization strategies in order to get seen on search engines in the first place.
You know that getting referral traffic is just as important, if not more, than organic traffic to your site. Referred visitors often land on your page due to a recommendation (in the form of a link or social share) from a trusted source. This means that these visitors aren’t just casually or accidentally arriving at your site – they’re already interested or engaged with your content or products.
Do any SEOs concentrate on search engines other than Google? While many would argue that it’s important, trying to optimize specifically for Yahoo or Bing doesn’t seem all that worth it when you look at the numbers. According to the latest comScore report, Bing still only has around 20 percent of the search market share.
Everybody knows how important images are on webpages. Visual content continues to get more and more popular, making pages that have large blocks of text without any images or video appear ever more outdated. Not to mention, image posts on social media tend to get much more engagement and traffic.
Google is no stranger legal action. Since its inception, the search giant has faced all sorts of lawsuits and accusations of wrongdoing. Now, Google is facing what might be its largest legal battle yet, as it prepares to defend itself against European Union charges that it’s been abusing its market power and violating EU antitrust laws.
According to Business Insider, 65.5 percent of the millions of people who use smartphones fail to download any new apps in a given month. This is despite the fact that over 1.4 billion apps are available in Apple’s app store and 1.5 billion are available in Google Play.
According to Google’s internal data, the trend that every webmaster has been preparing for is now a reality: more Google searches are being performed on mobile devices than on desktops in the U.S. It makes sense, as more and more people are using mobile devices as their only access to the internet, and Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm is fully up and running.
One of Mark Zuckerberg’s goals is to make Facebook’s News Feed a “perfect personalized newspaper” for every user. To do this, the News Feed algorithm attempts to show users the updates, birthdays, events and shared stories that it thinks would be most important to them. It follows that news sites have been very successful under this system.
Just as Google has made it essential for your site to be mobile-friendly, another big industry change that promises to benefit all internet users could be on the way. Luckily, just like having a responsive design, it’s probably something you’ve been considering – if not already doing – for quite some time.