So, for the second year in a row, Yoast held this YoastCon conference for practical SEO tips, tricks, and trends. This year, I followed it through the live stream and was able to pick up quite some useful things I’m now sharing with you.
Being relatively new, YoastCon is a conference that is organized by the maker of popular SEO plugin, Yoast. If anyone knows about SEO that would be those guys, right? In this one day event that happened yesterday, YoastCon addressed the changes in the SEO industry and shared top 2018 SEO tips that I’ll go over.
YoastCon 2017 intro
Just like Joost stated in his opening talk, the search in 2018 landscape is changing, big time. As computers evolved, so did the phones. iPhone X, for instance, is just as fast as the latest MacBook that Apple released. What does that mean? Well, all our phones are now computers!
This is why Google is finally releasing mobile first (I say mobile everything) indexing.The feature will roll out at the beginning of 2018, probably in the very first quarter. And why? The answer is very obvious and straightforward. Mobile phones changed the way we search. We no longer use just Google for searching, but Social Media, maps, various apps. Swarm for checking in, Foursquare to see where to eat, YouTube for tutorials, Google and Apple maps for the route, etc. Also, we more and more use voice commands and searches – starting from Siri and beyond.
As Joost stated, „voice search changes how people interact with search results.“
Something to think about.
With all that in mind, conferences like YoastCon are very important and valuable in understanding these 2018 SEO tips and all the ways we can use it to make our websites better and more searchable. So, I tried to sum up what I think is among essential things you all need to hear and implement in your work.
Top 2018 SEO tips from YoastCon
Mobile first
Every website needs to be mobile-friendly, there’s no doubt about it. If your site isn’t mobile ready, it won’t rank anymore, as simple as that. Google expects your site to work on the mobile phone, whether you have mobile visitors or not. And if you don’t have them coming from mobile, chances are that Google is already discounting you. If you don’t believe me – just ask Joost.
Content and readability
Content is, was and will be the king, for many many years to come. As Karl Gilis from AGConsult stated in his talk, the copy is utterly important. You should change your copy, so it changes the behavior of your visitor, meaning the good copy puts them into buying mood. Customer first, folks! And, it’s the very thing Dixon Jones from Majestic confirmed. On readability, always remember: content that’s easy to understand is also easier to rank, large sentences that are hard to be read by humans are hard to grasp meaning Google will have a problem with it. Hence, your page rank goes down as does your position on the search result.
Link building
Link building can be done in various ways, buying them is a terrible idea. Be creative, think outside of the box – use PR, Social Media marketing. Good PR in combination with the good link building can get you much better links than building bad websites that just links to your websites. More on that specific topic you’ll learn in the Laura Crimmons’s (branded3) great talk later on.
Website speed
More and more important thing. What you should all work on is to improve your site speed. Why? If your site is faster, it helps Google to crawl more pages in the same amount of time. If not for Google, do it for your visitors, that will help you.
End-user
Put your customer/visitor/end user first. Stop selling the way you want it and start selling the way people want to buy it. Great advice from Karl Gilis, your main goal should be to make visitor happy. Only when you succeed in that, hey will give you what you want – customer loyalty and money.
Conclusion
I share these tips with you because understanding these basic SEO principles will help you build better websites, maybe even with Meks themes and write better content. Hope you find them valuable as I did. Do share your thoughts with us in the comment section, thanks!