Making sure your website gains traffic is crucial to a website succeeding in today’s day and age. Considering that the internet is at its most popular at any present time, hitting a ‘home run’ with a website gaining traffic can make a huge difference to your online presence, business success and overall website’s health. To do this, it is vital to have good SEO.
However, as we all know, what good SEO and bad SEO is defined as is continually changing all the time, dictated by algorithm updates from the likes of Google. For this reason, here are three SEO tips to take advantage of for the new year of 2018.
 

#1 Https your Website

If you Google search, pretty much, anything, what you will find is that the vast majority of results will have a website URL that starts with ‘https://’ (and if it does not, it is probably www. But, clicking onto the website page should reveal it is still ‘https://’). Https is a simple way to make websites much more secure when the web user transmits data to and from the website’s server. Https means the connection is encrypted making it harder for information to be stolen from the website and web user. To get https on a website, you will need an SSL (Secure Socks Layer) certificate.
Google has made clear in the last 1-2 years that they are negatively ranking websites that do not have https, as well as defining them as ‘not secure’ in web browsers. Therefore, it is a necessity for all websites out there to implement.
 

#2 Concentrate on Featured Snippets

Featured snippets, in Google, is a way of displaying results from a web page that apply directly to what the web user searched for. For example, from searching ‘What is the recipe to make chocolate brownies?’, a featured snippet appears with the ingrediants:
Featured snippets should be concentrated on, in terms of getting your content onto such a format in Google because:

• The CTR of featured snippets are generally much higher than standard results.
• You can actually end up having the same web page displayed twice on Google, increasing the likelihood of a click onto the article (once as a featured snippet and once as a standard result).
• Results that are read to web users when they voice-search come from featured snippets. Therefore, to get traffic through voice-search, you will need to get featured as a snippet.

#3 Implement AMP

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is something Google likes for websites to have. What it allows is for the time between the click of a result on mobiles to viewing the web page to be significantly reduced, improving the web user’s experience with both Google and the website.
On top of this, it also improves the SEO of your website. Therefore, it would be silly not to use AMP for mobile web pages.