Search engine optimisation is a crucial element to every site’s health. However, knowing what optimisations you have to do for search engines that will benefit you is difficult to know considering that Google makes on average 500 changes to their search engine algorithms every year. Therefore, it is always important to stay ahead of the trend, when it comes to SEO, so that you are always maximising the potential of your website. With this in mind, here are 3 rules you can stick to in 2016 to make sure you gain as much traffic as possible from search engines like Google.
 

#1 Try to Implement Social Media into Posts

Social media is becoming a more dominant force in terms of SEO ever since Google made clear that social media posts, such as tweets and Facebook posts, will be getting their own organic ranking too. Therefore, it makes sense to try and include some sort of social media attachment to your article to maximise the organic ranking of your article. The way I like to look at social media nowadays is like the way we look at internal linking. Internal linking is great in terms of SEO as it makes your website more like a spider web to the search engine web crawlers.
 

#2 Longer Articles Perform Better

This is not a hidden secret – longer articles on the internet tend to perform better organically than shorter. Some of the reasons for this are that:

• Longer articles tend to be more useful to web users, since they go into further detail about a particularly topic. Therefore, the likelihood of the article getting linked elsewhere increases.
• Longer articles are hitting a better niche, so will rank better organically.
• Longer articles have more images and content to help Google decide what the article is about and how it should be ranked on their search engine.

Not too long ago, 300 words was considered good for SEO. However, times changed and it seems longer articles of 1,000-1,500 are hitting the sweet spots for the minimum amount of content for the best possible SEO.
 

#3 Mobile Optimisation is Key

Google also announced not too longer ago that themes that have been optimised for mobile will rank higher on mobile search results than websites without mobile-optimised themes. This signified a huge change for Google as it now means content is important and so is the theme of your website too.
For this reason, for good SEO, it is important to make sure the theme you have implemented for your website will adapt depending on what device is viewing it – mobile optimised. This will make sure you are giving your articles every possible chance of ranking the highest possible on Google and other search engine results.
 
Ultimately, times change and the way people will be performing SEO is changing too: based on how Google is changing their algorithms to make them more cleverer at ranking the best content highest. Therefore, make sure you stay up with this trend by following the above three rules.