SEO Tips To Future-Proof Your Blog

SOURCE: Blog­ging Pro

When it comes to search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO), noth­ing is ever final. We’re in era of mod­ern soci­ety where tech­nol­o­gy is mov­ing at break­neck pace. That means catch­ing up with the future of SEO, so to speak, is a lot of busy­work and you can even find your­self lost or con­fused when try­ing to future-proof your blog.

The hard part is that you need to do it. The hard­er part is that it is nev­er done. Do note that ensur­ing your SEO or blog is up to scratch is nev­er a one-and-done job. Once you’ve start­ed it, you have to keep doing it peri­od­i­cal­ly. There’s no fin­ish line but there’s more than just one race track, metaphor­i­cal­ly speak­ing. The most sound idea, how­ev­er, is to fol­low the tracks that give you the best results.

Sim­ply put, some tips are bet­ter than oth­ers when you want to future-proof your blog. Here are those tips you’ll have to keep in mind.

Keep track of Google

Google is your fren­e­my in terms of SEO. The search engine is both San­ta Claus and Kram­pus- some­times it gives, oth­er times… it makes you cry. A lot of things sim­ply depend on this one search engine since it’s basi­cal­ly the face of the known inter­net. That means any changes or updates Google imple­ments in its algo­rithm or oth­er aspects can have a rip­ple or domi­no effect on your SEO.

Even seem­ing­ly sim­ple or harm­less algo­rithm tweaks such as Mobi­leged­don can bite you back in the rear if you ignore it. As such, keep­ing track of any update Google does is para­mount to for­mu­lat­ing a tech­ni­cal reac­tion or plan. The same can be said for any oth­er SEO plat­forms such as YouTube (which some­what shares the same SEO as Google), Insta­gram, Face­book, and many oth­er SEO-depen­dent apps or websites.

Don’t underestimate mobile

There are more peo­ple in the world with mobile phones today than there are peo­ple with per­son­al com­put­ers. It’s not real­ly hard to see why; smart­phones are eas­i­er to use than com­put­ers and can also be tak­en any­where with ease. Suf­fice to say, there are more peo­ple view­ing inter­net data on their smart­phone than in their computers.

You ignore this, then you miss out on a huge chunk of audi­ence-base for your blog. As such, one of the best ways to future-proof your blog is to ensure that yours is mobile-friend­ly. The best case sce­nario would be hav­ing a smart­phone app ver­sion of your domain or at the very least, a mobile ver­sion of the web­site on a mobile brows­er. Remem­ber Google’s Mobi­leged­don algo­rithm update? It helps web­sites with mobile-friend­ly UI and con­tent to rank bet­ter in SEO. So, you’d nat­u­ral­ly want some of that.

Vox populi, voice search

You can treat this tip as an extend­ed part of that one above. Since peo­ple are using their mobile phones en masse to search for stuff online, they usu­al­ly do it in one of two meth­ods: by typ­ing (which is get­ting old) or by using voice search. Now, since how peo­ple talk by typ­ing can be vast­ly dif­fer­ent than how peo­ple talk vocal­ly, that can have a huge effect on SEO.

For one, peo­ple will often speak with­out gram­mat­i­cal errors- per­haps even in com­plete sen­tences or thoughts for voice search. This changes the play­ing field by quite a lot since we are all so used to pur­pose­ly mak­ing an error in word­ing or gram­mar just to insert that SEO key­word. It is even esti­mat­ed that by next year, 50 per­cent of all the inter­net search­es will con­sist of voice search commands.

Keywords are getting longer

Now, as for your SEO for voice search, it should be quite easy and sim­ple (at the moment). Usu­al­ly, all you have to do is to make the key­words or keyphras­es longer. Well, not by adding mum­bo jum­bo on them, of course, but mak­ing them gram­mat­i­cal­ly sound. You can use com­plete sen­tences which you think peo­ple would also use with Siri or Google’s voice assistant.

More­over, you might also want to include some ques­tions or query phras­es in there (how-to arti­cles or even tips come to mind). Do take note of the key­word in use and where they should be used; i.e., peo­ple who search for restau­rants tend to search for them in local areas. For that mat­ter, you might want to include spe­cif­ic cities or provinces (‘in New York,’ etc.) in your keyphras­es. This is in order to hit bet­ter rank­ing or become more vis­i­ble to your audi­ence or oth­er users.

Catch up with tech

We did men­tion ear­li­er that the inter­net is an ever-evolv­ing cyber ecosys­tem. Google or any oth­er web­sites that uti­lize or thrive on SEO are just some of the rapid­ly chang­ing mem­bers of this ecosys­tem. Every once in a while for SEO, a new “thing” gets intro­duced and with it, a new tech­nol­o­gy which helps ana­lyze or uti­lize it better.

At least plan­ning for such a tech­no­log­i­cal shift is cer­tain­ly a good way to future-proof your blog. Again, you’ll have to con­stant­ly do it and one tool might not even be enough. Today, one of the shiny new tech Google or oth­er com­pa­nies are going crazy for is A.I. or arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. It’s not just data col­lec­tion and analy­sis the A.I. exceeds in, but also with per­son­al­iza­tion. They can tai­lor search results or even sug­ges­tions based on a customer’s intent. This is incred­i­bly impor­tant for mar­ket­ing. Hence, keep­ing an eye out for sim­i­lar tech can go a long way.

Let the audience participate

Noth­ing gives peo­ple online a moti­va­tion to stay more than being a part of an online com­mu­ni­ty. That’s why forums and closed inter­net groups exist. As for your blog, you can also cre­ate your own loose­ly-knit com­mu­ni­ty by let­ting your audi­ence cre­ate con­tent. If you already have a decent fol­low­ing, you can do this by intro­duc­ing chal­lenges (pos­i­tive ones, of course) with your spe­cial­ized hash­tag or key­word or oth­er inter­net tropes or trends.

This lets the users cre­ate their own con­tent and par­tic­i­pate in your blog. So, even when you’re stag­nat­ing on con­tent, they can ease things up. Beyond that, you can also lis­ten to their feed­back and let them see what they like or would want to see. This also helps you cre­ate bet­ter con­tent which, in turn, can give you a bet­ter chance to gauge what’s in or what’s hot.

Content is the key

With all that’s been said and done, your blog or website’s con­tent will still be doing the heavy lift­ing when it comes to SEO. Hence, find­ing ways to inno­vate or come up with fresh new ideas with­out stray­ing too far from your niche is also an ide­al way to future-proof your blog. Like tech, it should be an ongo­ing process where you’ll always want your pre­vi­ous works to serve as points of com­par­i­son for your work now or in the future.

Basi­cal­ly, you’re eval­u­at­ing your past con­tent. This makes you aware which ones clicked and didn’t. Addi­tion­al­ly, you will want to keep things as organ­ic as pos­si­ble. Don’t just aim for arti­fi­cial traf­fic or means to get as many clicks as pos­si­ble. The more impor­tant part is to retain your audi­ence or vis­i­tors with qual­i­ty con­tent that keeps improving.