SEO Guide for Blogs, Business and eCommerce Websites in 2017

Whether you’re running a blog, a business website or an online shop, in 2017 you can’t do without a solid SEO strategy. How do you bring more traffic to your website? 80% of web traffic is generated via search engines, so it’s about time you thought of investing into a solid SEO campaign. Before you start thinking about SEO, there’s something that blogs, business and eCommerce websites need – great design. No matter how apt you are at search engine optimization, nobody likes ugly and old-fashioned websites. Luckily, there are plenty of web design template providers to select from. Resources like from TemplateMonster offer hundreds of web themes for any CMS and eCommerce engines. User-friendly platforms like WordPress CMS are universal tools you can run any type of projects on. It’s amazing that WordPress business themes can be customized to become a personal blog or an online store. The ultimate goal of any website owner is to make an online resource stand out among the competitors. SEO specialists achieve this aim by getting a website into the top 10 of the search engine results. Or making it the 1st position on Google’s SERP. This SEO guide is all about the tips and tricks of making it to the top of Google rankings in 2017.

SEO for Bloggers in 2017

• Keyword Selection

First, let’s talk about the SEO for bloggers to understand the fields where effort should be made. Even though proper keyword research is important for any website to be found online, the sphere of blogging may seem a bit more demanding. For a blogger it is wise to go after long-tail keywords because these are low competition phrases, providing the web users with the most precise search results. Body keywords consisting of 2-3 words have lower search volumes (approximately 2,000 monthly searches) and can also be used for optimization purposes.

• Keyword Placement

Once you’ve figured out targeted keywords, you need to think about keyword placement. Make sure that keywords are present in: post title, meta description, permalink, h1 tag, image alt text. Avoid keyword abuse, keeping the keyword density rate to a 2.5% density per blog post. To win the battle for better rankings, use LSI keywords essentially related to the terms you are searching for. Latent semantic indexing (LSI) uses search patterns and user behavior, to help search engines understand how one keyword search is linked to another. In general using LSI keywords is capable of boosting the pagerank of a blog post.

• Blog Post Title

Catchy titles act as clickbait urging a user to visit the needed web page. Keep in mind, a blog post title is the first step to find out if your content is relevant for both search engines and web users. Which is why make sure to include your targeted keyword within the first 65 characters of a headline. It has been observed that headlines 8–12 words long get the most social shares. Also, try to make a title more relatable and visual using alliterations, or puns, if relevant.

• Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are still a huge ranking factor in 2017. The number and quality of backlinks to your website help Google search bots estimate the value and relevance of an online resource. Link-building can be a path of trial and error at times, yet there are plenty of strategies to get backlinks for a resource. Here are some of the most used ones:

• guest posting (publishing articles with backlinks to your site on somebody else’s blog)
• comments on popular blog posts
• forums and message boards
• links exchange
• press releases
• social media shares
• Guest Posting

One of the most reliable link-building strategies is guest-posting for sure. Whenever you’re engaged in link building it’s important to make sure that your content should be relevant to the link anchor text. It’s better if anchor text contains one of your targeted keywords instead of phrases like ‘click here’ or ‘read more’. Below you can see the example of an anchor text:

eCommerce SEO in 2017

Now, let’s talk about business and SEO for eCommerce in 2017. If you want your e-store to shine on the web, use the practices listed below.

• Product Pages Optimization

It is important to make title tags unique for every product page. For this try using unique key phrases instead of keywords. Also, make sure the length of a key phrase is under 65-70 characters and that it is placed at the beginning of your title tag. In case you’ve run out of a particular product, use a permanent 301 redirect for redirecting your expired product URL to a similar product page or a dynamically generated message page. Failure to use this strategy, will result in traffic loss, as well as loss in ranking and link juice.

• Category Pages Optimization

Compared to product pages, category pages bear more importance, so they need optimization to show up first in the search engine results. Choose general key phrases for category pages, while more specific for product pages. This way, category pages will prevent individual product pages from competing for the same keyword. To generate incoming traffic to a specific category page and attract visitors to your sales funnel, use the following optimization steps:

• Add your target keyword in the image ALT text and file name
• Insert keywords in your H1 tag, page description and page title
• SEO permalinks
• Insert LSI keywords into the content
• Optimize for Mobile

Since, Google is indexing the mobile version of a website, if it’s available, there is a need to think about SEO for mobile. Such elements as contents, page speed, meta tags are now to be used to influence both desktop and mobile versions rankings. This is due to the growing popularity of mobile search over the desktop search. But how do you make an e-store more mobile-friendly from Google’s point of view? First of all, get rid of software and applications hindering mobile performance of your store. Ensure that the text is adapted for mobile screens, it’s clear and readable without zooming. While developing your store, size the content of your website to make sure it fits different mobile screen resolutions. Make sure that the links or buttons are placed wide enough to be easily tapped by a user.

• Use Rich Snippets and Schema Markup

Is there a way to let people see that your store has enough credit among the customers already in search results? It’s absolutely possible thanks to rich snippets. Rich snippets raise the visibility of your goods, give more information to the web users and enormously help conversion rates. Using schema markup provides the search engines with details on your products and display it in SERPs. Rich snippets usually contain the following:

• reviews
• events
• software reviews
• goods
• recipes
• Even though rich snippets are not a significant ranking factor, they can still increase the CTRs and help you raise your revenues. Speaking of schema markups should for any eCommerce project, use the following:
• Products
• Using markup to provide the product information will allow the search engines to differentiate your product page from a blog post. Also, markup for product pages will allow you to give more information about the color, size, model of goods and offer related products.
• Pricing
• It is important for customers to know about the pricing range for specific goods. In this respect, schema markup supplies users with pricing of your products directly from SERPs, which allows for better CTR.
• Rating and Testimonials
• There’s nothing better for adding credibility to your services than the use of user ratings and reviews. Testimonials have proven to be even more influential for closing sales than the content itself. Schema markup allows including rating and reviews in SERPs to supply web users with more social proof.Breadcrumbs for Product PagesFor search engines, permalinks serve as an aide to understand the page content, so it goes without saying that your eshop will only benefit from using self-explanatory permalinks. Speaking of eCommerce projects, below you’ll find a few examples of self-explanatory permalinks:
• For a product category page: https://www.e-shop.com/category/
• For a product sub-category page: https://www.e-shop.com/category/sub-category/
• For a product page: https://www.e-shop.com/category-sub-category/product-name/
• Handy navigation is crucial for positive user experience, so you should think of the best navigation structure to avoid cart abandonment and decrease in rankings.As for breadcrumbs, use it on all product pages for helping users in locating themselves on a website. Location-based breadcrumbs show both web users and search engine bots the present location within to the overall structure of a web store, which gets reflected in the search engine results and allows to increase CTRs.

  Conclusions

  Following the tips laid out in this SEO guide will absolutely help you make your blog, business or eCommerce project more search engine friendly. Keeping an eye on the latest SEO trends will help you realize the areas you need to work on in 2017. What do you think of the tips provided in this article? Is there anything that, as you think, needs being mentioned? Feel free to sound off in the comment section below!