Something mentioned a lot in web design communities is the idea of SEO best practices. There is an entire subculture of the technology world dedicated to figuring out how the algorithms that Google employs categorize and prioritize search results.

2020 rolls off the tongue a little better than 2019, doesn’t it? It’s a sleek year marking the turn of the decade, and over the past year, we've developed some appropriately sleek new strategies to adapt to the ever-changing SEO landscape. Without further ado, here are seven top SEO strategies to carry you into the coming year.

By now you know that if you’re going to have a website for commercial purposes, it needs to be optimized. In addition to following UX guidelines so that visitors want to spend time on your site, you also need to focus on SEO. Unless you don’t care about being discovered organically, or ranking in search, you need to follow best practices like adding metadata or keyword targeting. But did you know that even the content you create needs to be developed with SEO in mind? Specifically, if you want to integrate video into your website, or leverage it for marketing purposes, it’s essential to make SEO a priority.

Voice search optimization (VSO) refers to the practice of maximizing your company’s search visibility for voice-based queries. 

There’s quite a bit of overlap with your desktop SEO strategy, but there are several key differences in typed vs. spoken queries that produce different results—and it’s crucial that you understand these differences if you want your pages to beat out your competitors’ in the SERPs.

As anyone who has ever dabbled in SEO knows, the algorithms that Google, Bing, and other search engines use to rank the listings on their search results pages are closely guarded secrets. Sure, all search engine companies provide general guidelines for maximizing your site rankings, but the specific factors that are considered, where the data for these factors comes from, and how the factors are weighted against each other are trade secrets on par with that of the Coca-Cola formula.

A picture is worth a thousand clicks. Images can bring life to your webpage, explain concepts that are difficult to write out, and pull in traffic from users with visual appetites – provided that you’re using them correctly. Almost all modern websites use images in their design. Whether that usage is sparing or splendorous, you need to put in the work to optimize your images for search engines.

In the old Western movies and TV shows, it was easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. The heroes wore white hats (Exhibit A: The Lone Ranger), and the villains wore black hats. Right?

Well, not so much. It turns out that a comprehensive look at the Western film genre shows that there was actually no consistency in this regard. There were good guys wearing black and bad guys wearing white. But for some reason, we as a culture have made this literal black-and-white distinction.

So much so, in fact, that we now use the terms “white hat” and “black hat” to distinguish benevolent vs. malevolent intent in other areas. The prime example is found in cybersecurity. “Black hat” hackers are the bad guys who try to infiltrate computer systems and networks, steal data, and make life generally miserable for people. “White hat” hackers are the ones who try to find system vulnerabilities and report them so they can be patched before the black-hat hackers can exploit them.

Once upon a time, website owners were flummoxed by two competing desires:

• Website design and content that was compelling, usable, useful, and pleasurable for human visitors
• Website design and content that was optimized for search engine optimization (SEO).

The information architects—the people who design pages with human users in mind—often were at loggerheads with the SEO experts, who wanted pages that web crawlers could find easily and rank highly in search results. Depending on which party had more clout on the web implementation team, a website might end up optimized for one at the cost of the other.

Happily, progress in search engine technology has changed SEO best practices to the point where you don’t have to sacrifice the usability of a website in order to eke out a higher search ranking. 

There’s nothing wrong with the tried-and-true SEO tactics we grew up on. Link-building, long-tailed keyword focus, and quality content are as relevant today as they ever were, but these basic strategies aren’t the only tools in the SEO marketer’s arsenal. Below, we’d like to review a few uncommon-yet-important SEO tactics that you might not be aware of.

Half of consumers who do a local search visit a store within a day, and 78% of local-mobile searches result in offline purchases. In case it isn’t clear, local SEO is kind of a big deal. It’s no secret at this point that the cellular phone has become a bonafide human appendage. If you’re not throwing up a flag on the internet, you’re basically nonexistent to the growing portion of humanity that navigates life through their cell phone. Local SEO is a prerequisite for any store looking to wrangle some offline foot traffic.

The issue with local SEO is that digital marketers are all over the place when it comes to tactics, making it difficult to lay out industry standard best practices. Priorities span from on-site optimization to social media and email marketing to website design. If you’re new to all this, the confusion and lack of consensus can leave you scratching your head wondering how to leave your local footprint. A good strategy moves forward on multiple fronts. Luckily, we’re here to highlight the winning routes to building a quality local SEO strategy.