DO: Focus on Page Speed
We all know how important page speed is by this point, but the thing people may have missed is that Google has changed how they measure it. It used to be based on your page’s technical specs, but now it’s based on your page’s Chrome User Experience Report—an aggregate of load times and other data taken from Chrome users interacting with your page. The usual web speed optimization tips apply but it’s critically important in 2019 that you include testing on the Chrome browser specifically: it’s a lot more representative of how fast Google thinks your site is.
DON’T: Stuff Keywords
We all know Keyword Stuffing. What’s Keyword Stuffing? Well, Keyword Stuffing is when you Stuff Your Keywords and Google Doesn’t Like It And Will Punish You For It. Despite having been a significant negative-SEO factor for years, it remains one of the most persistent industry antipatterns. You don’t need to go far to see it. Particularly bad are bolded exact-match keywords, like I shoved into that paragraph up there. Doubly bad is shoving a link to your splash page in one of those bad boys. They used to be link-juice champagne, but now they’re poison. Absolutely 1000% with sunshine sparkles on top, under all circumstances avoid Keyword Stuffing.
No single law has changed the way the whole web feels than the GDPR, which went into effect last May. It still isn’t clear whether Google has implemented protocols that favour GDPR-compliant pages in SERPs but apocryphally, from talking to digital marketers, it seems to have an effect. Particularly in Europe. Even if there’s no formal ranking factors a play, the ability to reach European users without getting into hot water should be enough to convince you to keep your pages updated and compliant.
DON’T: Overuse Affiliate Links
I’m not saying you need to burn your entire affiliate program, but too many affiliate links is something Google uses as an indicator that your site is not legitimate. They’re very aware of the existence of pay-for-post backlink sites and are putting a lot of effort into removing their ability to function. A lot of these sites will host exceptionally thin content, stuffed with affiliate links and backlinks, as a way of artificially inflating search rank.
DO: Make Judicious use of NoFollow Tags
The function of the humble NoFollow tag has changed a lot since its inception. Originally thought off as SEO poison, it became obvious that strategic use of them could boost your SERP rankings considerably. It’s important to note that spiders do crawl NoFollow links in 2019—they give them less priority than DoFollow links but they will crawl them and that’s very useful to know with regard to linkbuilding strategy.
DON’T: Place Spammy Links
“Wait, spiders crawl NoFollow now? Does that mean I can get a bot to paste my links into 1000 reddit threads and get an instant first-rank?”
Well yeah, for years now. It’s amazing how many folks missed that one. On the topic of bots: keep that black hat stuff out of it. It’s bad form but it’s also just not very effective: part of the reason Google have relaxed the rules around NoFollow is that they’ve gotten better at detecting spam links. They don’t need NoFollow as a bastion against them any more, because they’ve got more sophisticated protections in place. They now use an aggregate of hundreds of smaller factors (including, if you were going to try spamming on Reddit, how downvoted you’ll inevitably get) to figure out whether or not your links are legitimate.
DO: Prioritise Mobile Content
In 2018, mobile devices officially overtook desktop as the place users actually access the internet from. Not by coincidence, Google rolled out their ‘mobile first’ policy, that includes and forefronts mobile pages in how their crawlers index your content. Mobile went from a null factor to the most important factor overnight, and we’re still working out how to deal with it.
DON’T: Forget Desktop Pages
The mobile/desktop isn’t an either/or decision, it’s a complementary ecosystem. Mobile pages influence rank more than desktop pages, but desktop still matters. If you optimize solely for mobile, then you’re doing yourself a profound disservice. A good SEO strategy understands that people access your pages from a variety of different devices and accommodates them all.
DO: Write Content People Want
We’ve all heard this one before, but it bears repeating because it’s still true. Google’s own data suggests that bounce time is absolutely critical. If content is low-quality, keyword stuffed or otherwise written in a way designed more for spiders than humans, it is going to suffer: it can be perfectly SEO optimised, but if humans bounce then it’s not good SEO content.
Google have always wanted the same thing, they’ve just got better at doing it, and a lot of old techniques are being squeezed out because Google never planned for them in the first place.
What Google wants is simple:
Google wants a user to search for something, and for that user to find the answer they want at the top of the page.
Trying to trick them only ever works temporarily. Sure, you’ve found some lava-hot new greyhat exploit that will drive up your traffic 500% overnight, but as soon as Google figure it out then they’re going to change the way their algorithm works and derank you, and you’ll have just been wasting your time. Greyhat SEO is temporary; if you give Google what they want, then your high SERP rankings are longer lasting.
Even discounting greyhat techniques, a lot of whitehatting is temporary, because changing technology and trends obsolete it. Remember Flash? Remember skeuomorphism? Remember ‘pivot to video’? All hailed as groundbreaking new paradigms, all now regarded as kitschy, dated, and maybe never that great to begin with. That’s not to say good content is the only part of good SEO, but good content is the most stable thing in a remarkably fast-moving river, and it needs to be part of your strategy. It’s the simple truth that needs to underlie any SEO campaign: write content that matches what people search for.
DON’T: Worry Too Much About JavaScript Popups
Google’s 2016 announcement that they were going to punish ‘intrusive interstitials’ sent shockwaves around the community. Was every subscription popup going to send you plummeting down the ranks? Were JS event listeners SEO poison? There was never a single definitive moment where we locked down the specifics, but the general consensus at this point is that—to qualify as ‘intrusive’—a popup needs to be really very bad. You shouldn’t make an animated full-page technicolor flashing nightmare that appears every 10 seconds, but at the point where it actually hurts SEO is the point where it hurts worse by being terrible web design. Your standard call to action popup isn’t going anywhere. Even today, I hear marketers worrying that a subscription popup is going to kill their site, to which I say: don’t.
But don’t just take our word for it. There’s lots of other SEO best practice guides out there to help you get the most out of your SERPs in 2019.