Best SEO Practices of 2017

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the beast that you need to tame if you have an online business that competes with rival offerings. Staying at the cutting edge of SEO involves constant evolution and a keen eye for statistical data. What worked in 1997 is a millennium old in the Internet timeline and thus is a fossil in 2017. The explosion in statistical data over the years compounded by their diversification and obfuscation means that finding reliable data is also no mean feat.

CONTENT IS KING (said Bill Gates) and it has held true all these years. Search Engines earn most of their revenue through advertising but it is the Search Bar that leads people to those advertisements. Due to this peculiar setup, Google and their ilk have constantly updated their search algorithms to project good content over “spammy” content to attract audiences to their websites. This separation of wheat from the chaff only ensures that good content is preferred but doesn’t offer solutions when all content is original, informative and niche.

CONTENT MAY BE KING BUT MARKETING IS THE QUEEN AND RUNS THE HOUSEHOLD (said Gary Vynerchuk) and that has held true as well. This is where the world of SEO enters the lexicon of website development. SEO has undergone fundamental changes multiple times over its lifetime which began as PAID ADS on search engines to branch out into organic search refining and embedded itself firmly into the integral process of web development.

SEO involves the use of many confounding and obvious terminologies and a thorough reading on them is advised for the budding enthusiast.

The following are the best SEO practices for 2017 in a simple bullet-form style which the user can print/screen shot for later reference:

Find crawl errors in your site and eliminate them.
Do the same for Broken Links.
Submit your site to the Bing Webmaster Centre.
Grab existing backlinks and get new ones by skyscrapering.
NOINDEX content deficient pages on your website.
Put your keywords in H1 tags.
Use Meta-Titles and Meta Descriptions (not more than 60 words each)
Use ALT TEXT for images,
Avoid duplicacy of content.
Try to keep static URLs for indexed pages.
Internally Link the pages of your website.
Get High Quality Outbound Links.
Keep a tab on your Bounce Rate.
Check Mobile-friendliness of your website.
Use your Primary keywords in the URLs
Get links from competitors ranked higher than you.
Author Guest posts on Influencer Websites.
Look up Quote directories.
Hop onto all social media websites and be active there.
Create badges for community websites.
Use Awards to entice traffic.
Sponsor a crowd-funded project and score backlinks.
Keep Title tag under 70 words.
Keep Text/HTML ratio over 40%
Set a canonical tag.
Implement HTML headings.
Get Micro-format markup and Schema.org markup
Run the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to validate the above.
Get Open Graph Objects and validate on Facebook Object Debugger Tool.
Get Twitter Cards and validate on Twitter card validator tool.
Get Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Specify a language for your website.
Move all inline CSS rules to an external file.
Combine all scripts into a single scripts.
Combine all CSS into a single stylesheet.
Compress all components using gzip.
Reduce DNS lookups.
Configure ETags (Entity Tags)
Reduce DOM elements.
Minify JavaScript and CSS.
Make fewer HTTP requests (by using fewer images)
Target long tail keywords.
Abandon use of Keywords Meta tags.

As pointed out above, SEO is an ever-evolving phenomenon which implies that ths list is not exhaustive and will be updated from time to time.