Like e-commerce, SEO is constantly changing. Just when you think you've cracked it, it alters in some way and you have to catch up to compete. Here are 5 things you need to know about SEO in 2015.
1. Answer people's questions
The first thing you need to do is stop getting hung up on keywords. Google is now so complex that it can detect the topics you're website is about without you having to stuff keywords in to your pages.
Think about it from Google's perspective – they want to remain the best search engine in the world, so more than anything they want their user's experience to be as positive as possible. Because of that, they seek to rank higher than those who answer their searchers' questions. Google rewards those who create content that does a very simple thing: answers people's questions.
A side note here: if you want to optimise your site for search engines, make sure you aren't copying any content. This is important; if it is detected that your content in fact originates from elsewhere on the web, you could be penalised.
2. Site speed will become more important
Site speed is usually measured by the time it takes to load a single page. Not only does this help with your conversions, but Google has also confirmed that they use site speed as a factor in determining page ranking.
Again, thinking about page ranking from Google's perspective, they want people to find the result they're looking for as quickly as possible. That's a pretty solid reason for ranking faster sites higher. Also, search engines only have a limited capacity to crawl pages, so if your site is slow it could mean that fewer pages will be crawled and you could have less of your site indexed on the engine.
Considering the fact that 50% of ecommerce traffic now comes from mobile devices, where connections are typically slower, site speed will become even more important in 2015.
Here are a few influences of page speed that you can change almost immediately:
Image size
If your images are too large, this will substantially bring down the time your pages take to load. Often there are ways of getting your images to a much smaller file size without comprising on quality. For example, if you use Photoshop, always ensure that you 'Save for Web' rather than just click 'Save As'. This will automatically bring the size down and let you toggle with functions to get it perfect.
Large code files
CSS, HTML and Javascript files being too large can be seriously detrimental to the loading speed of a site. If you don't know much about code, that's fine, there are programs you can use to compress the files without having to go through and edit it manually. There are even online programs you can use; all you have to do is paste in your code to a box on the site and it will automatically compress it. It does this for all CSS, HTML and Javascript files.
Distribute your content
If your server can't produce all of your content at a high speed, you could consider employing a content distribution network (CDN), which is, simply put, a small network of servers that all hold your site's content. Through this, the heavy load of loading your pages is distributed, which increases your site speed. You know what they say – a problem shared is a problem halved!
3. Don't be afraid of linking out
Linking out to different sites can be great for SEO, but only if those sites are relevant and high quality. The sites that you link to are used by search engines as a measure of whether your site is one of high quality or one that simply spams with links. In Google's eyes, low quality sites link to junk, while great sites link to other great sites.
You can take advantage of this by linking to resources that are full of great content; they would have already been indexed as a good site by the search engine, so in a sense you're looking good by association!
Careful though – link out too much and you could be mistaken for a spammy site.
4. People talking about you on social is good
There's no denying the power of social networking. Infamously started in Zuckerberg's dorm room at Harvard, Facebook has had a massive impact on the world, currently clocking in at well over 1bn users. New social networks are being launched every year, hoping to emulate Facebook and Twitter's success, making the world more social than ever.
Millenials are being raised to communicate socially online, so it's unsurprising that the power of social networks is being harnessed by businesses to sell their products and services to this easily-accessible audience.
Big search engines like Google are known for rewarding links to your site, as this shows that you're a business with considerable authority in your industry, but research suggests that they are now taking in social media factors too. If your business's Twitter profile has a lot of followers, if you get a lot of links to your site shared on social networks, if people are mentioning your account in posts, all of these factors will be taken into account when determining the ranking of your site in their results.
Of course, don't forget Google+. If you are focusing on Google as a search engine, which you probably should be, it's pretty obvious that they will favour posts from their own platform. Links to your site shared by people on G+ is a factor in Google's ranking order. Those links that have been +1'd by people have even more value.
5. Fix all broken links
In the best practice guidelines outlined by Google, something they tell people to do is 'check for broken links'.
A broken link is a link to a page that has no content on it, because of the page either being deleted or moved by a web developer. Most sites will have a few, and while you won't be penalised for that, sites with a lot of broken links will suggest one of two things to Google: either your site isn't maintained very well, or it isn't maintained at all. Either way, this is hardly a site that they will be ranking very highly.
Finding and, more importantly, fixing broken links doesn't have to be a very difficult job. There are a variety of free web-based programs you can use; all you have to do is type in the URL of the site you want to crawl. We would recommend the aptly titled brokenlinkcheck.com for this.
Conclusion
2015 will fly by before you know it, so what are you waiting for? Take these tips and run with them!