Four Essential Pillars of Your SEO Strategy

There was a time when SEO had been solely concerned with building backlinks, posting relevant content and on-page optimization. However, experts are now advocating a more inclusive SEO strategy. It should go beyond devising new ways of content marketing and link building.

The present day SEO practices are focusing on brand building and how to impact search queries. It is quite opposite of the past when they usually worked with a bunch of keywords and created content around them. Content marketing and link building are still relevant to SEO of any website, but there are other players as well. In this post, we have discussed the essential building blocks of your SEO strategy:

1. Integration of Real-time Penalty Filters

The Google core algorithm has over 200 different ranking factors. All of these factors are responsible for the website ranking and how the search engine response to search queries. With the launch of Penguin 4.0, your website will face the danger of real-time penalty.

You might be wondering what does that mean. This means if you are purchasing backlinks or your backlinks seed fishy to Google, your website will be penalized at the very moment. But there is also a good news for SEOs. As soon as they remove those spammy backlinks, the algorithm will detect that change and improve ranking. Before this update, SEOs had to wait for the next update to remove Penguin penalty.

Now Penguin and Panda both are integrated in the Google’s core algorithm. These moves clearly indicate that Google is serious in fighting spam in search results. SEOs will see quick results of their efforts.

2. Accelerated Mobile Pages

At the start of this year, Google integrated its mobile search results with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) results by displaying ”Top Stories”. Later, these results became part of regular search results. At this moment, Google has indexed more than 150 million AMP files. Google has announced to direct mobile users to the corresponding AMP results even if a similar app page exists.

These developments show that Google definitely knows that more and more users are searching for queries through mobiles. AMP results bring the mobile web equal to native apps. This change is here to stay.

3. RankBrain

Google has termed RankBrain as the third most important factor in the Google’s core algorithm. However, in the SEO world, it is quite misunderstood. Since its launch, RankBrain is shrouded by different myths and mysteries. It was among the few algorithm which were first announced to a news publication. The general tech savvy readers and search engine marketers both want to know more about its features.

Google has made great success in utilizing machine learning to boost their search algorithm. However, SEOs need to understand that RankBrain doesn’t view your backlinks, click-through rates or content quality. It just enables the algorithm to interpret search queries in a better way and then match them with page content.

According to industry experts, this factor will gain more significance in the future. However, as stated by Garry Illyes by Google that nothing can be done to optimize your website for RankBrain.

4. The Knowledge Graph

Google has launched its Knowledge Graph to organize the global information and make it worldwide accessible. In short, Google is trying to replicate Wikipedia. It is a knowledge base to boost Google’s search results with semantic-search information. For this purpose wide variety of sources are used like Wikidata, the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia.

The number of queries using this knowledge base is steadily increasing. At the moment, over 40% of search results are displayed with these ”rich answers”. Marketers are trying to influence what Google knows about their brands and tells its searchers. If your website’s information is included in these ‘’rich answers’’, it would surely boost authority of your website.

 

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