Whatever way you look at websites online, you cannot ignore the fact the dominant variable which affects how well a website does online is it’s search engine presence. This is why SEO is so important to websites as it really has the potential to make or break a website’s performance and success. For those that want to continually perform SEO on their website (for one, I am one of these people), you can sometimes get a bit confused what exactly SEO is. After all, Google brings updates to their search engine algorithms all the time which slightly changes what good SEO is and what bad SEO is. Therefore, without further ado, here are three things I have learnt from analysing the results which makes good SEO for 2016.
 
 

#1 1,000 Word Articles

This does not mean articles that below a thousand words articles will not do any good on search engines. To be quite frank, you will get good SEO from 500 word articles. However, I have found that to be safe of any future algorithm updates 1,000 words is what you should be targeting for your article lengths – that is not just 1,000 words of rubbish either but high quality content!
This does depend on the market your website is targeting. For example, you may have a very niche website which reviews different types of apples – I don’t think a review of an apple would take 1,000 words no matter how tasty that apple might be. But, on the other hand, if you have a website of reviewing cars, it should be relatively easy to reach 1,000 words and go beyond that too.
 
 

#2 Include Named Images with Captions

In the past, I have mentioned the fact that images enable your article to be viewed to a whole new pool of web users: web users that use image search engines. However, I never really explained how to give your image good SEO for such image search engines.
The way to do this is to correctly name your image before uploading it and then, optionally, adding a caption which explains the image different to it’s name. By doing this, you will be preparing your image for the best possible image SEO.
 
 

#3 Be Even More Careful With Comment Moderation

If you have a WordPress website, there are lots of plugins out there that will help you filter the spam comments from the real comments. As much as these are useful, they are never perfect and can sometimes allow spam comments to slip through.
At the end of the day, comments still play an important part to SEO as it tells Google how popular your article is to web users – if lots of people genuinely comment on your article, Google knows that the article must be important and worth something in terms of it’s search engine ranking.
For this reason, make double the effort to not allow any spam comments to go live on your website. Only allow genuine comments to be approved (if you are unsure, be safe rather than sorry).