This year has come and now it’s reaching the end. Well, there is a need to look forward to the future, and that means the next year, 2016. As we leave 2015 behind, there were some important lessons learned that needs to be inculcated into the mix and this would mean having to disregard certain strategies that will not end up doing anything for anyone in the coming year. But here are the strategies that will be indeed useful in the coming year, and which you will have to definitely be strong on for it will most likely dominate the SEO sector in the entirety of next year.

Original, Quality Content and Marketing

The emphasis on creating quality and original content cannot be stressed enough as this an imperative for any good strategy. For too long have people just rambled on content after content that has been either plagiarized or has been written with seriously no conviction whatsoever and just for the sake of creating content to get their ranking in SERPs higher.

But this will not be a seriously viable strategy. For as long as you start compromising on the quality of your content for attempts at getting better ranking; effectively making the content a slave for all the other SEO Tactics, you will lose the credibility of your readers who will soon realize that the deteriorating and they will go towards another site which will have supplied better content.

A great written content is the best tool for enhancing your website reputation and ranking, but it is not the only source of content. Content can take the form of any other piece of information, especially interactive ones that the audience can take in. This mean creating informative, original and in the rare cases exceptional content on all mediums – videos, PowerPoint presentations, and infographics will give you an edge over the rest of the competition as it will create trust in your regular audience. Moreover, creating a stream of original content will give Google the notion that your site is regularly active and keen on delivering high quality, something that the algorithm appreciates and will see your site getting ranked higher and higher.

Link Building

Backlinks

Get the hang of getting backlinks from your competitors, because this will ensure that you will not be left behind at all. These backlinks will be available to them but will not be for you, for that you have to go through their entire catalog of backlinks. There are several SEO Tools out there that will let you get these backlinks from the competitors. Use them and narrow it down to the best quality ones.

In the case of a backlinks that you gain through a really reputable website which incidentally your competitor has linked to as well, there will occur the peculiar phenomenon of getting an indirect backlink from your competitor.

Sometimes there will occur backlinks which will have been broken due to the fact that specific link on your website might not be in the same place – that you have moved it. Then it is imperative that find out these broken links and make an effort to fix them as soon as possible. Tools exist which will find out these dead links and generate a new .htaccess file which you can replace the old link with.

Another fact that you must consider is that Google’s gives its reward not only on the basis of the quality of the backlinks but also the health of that backlink. Another thing that you might possible overlook is that a simple mention of your site by a third party can be turned into a backlink if you contact the webmaster and request that a backlink be put up.

Manual Link Building

When I say, manual link building, I am obviously referring to the ones which you do when you have to take your time and do it laboriously one by one. Though, there is a general perception that this sort of link building will eventually diminish in status and will become obsolete, there is far greater evidence that this is just a myth.

Though the attempt at creating mass link building will give more links on the basis of quantity, the quality y of those will be extremely substandard and won’t amount to anything. The success rate of conversion of these links into a successful opportunity is very limited. But on the other hand, when manual link building occurs, there is a greater chance at creating a success ratio, because when someone engages in manual link building, they are connecting with another human being with genuine interest and on a complementary basis.

These link building opportunities will require real marketing efforts from your part, instead of a few clicks on a software machine. The marketing skills that you might want to inculcate before you make the attempts would be: Persuasiveness, Audience Research, Critical Thinking, Relevance and Relationship Building.

Automation of link building will not have the feeling that you’re doing something more than just a menial task, it is a mechanical task. This may become even more despondent when the automation you are doing does not produce good tangible results, but if you have done it through manual methods, you will not feel so as you know that have made a conscientious effort personally to make sure that there is a good quality links that connects back to your site.

Keyword Research

Long Tail Keywords are going to be the thing in the next year. Long tail keywords mean those keywords which mimic the organic searches that actual people would type into the google search boxes. These long-tail keywords can be gathered after a good and long brainstorming session about all the possible ways any sentence or query might be related to your product or service, the best way to know about this is to think from the perspective of the customer. And of course, google will have in its capacity certain tools to help you acquire some of them.

Google has in its arsenal: Google Trends – which shows the most popular searches for a particular time or subject; Google keyword planner – especially tuned for PPC; Auto fills of Google Searches 0 the Auto fill in shows the actual impulsive search queries of people and you can use that, maybe even without any change, as the long-tail keyword.

Ever since Google’s Hummingbird Action came out in 2013, semantic search indexing has become more of a prominent way of keyword optimization, it entails that not only should the most high value keywords be kept in focus, but we should consider the synonyms of the specific words that is related to your service or products. This means instead of using single keywords as authoritative keyword queries, keywords that has a conversational quality with a natural language structures could become as authoritative as other keywords.

Analysis of a keyword is also an effective method of filtering out the bad ones form the most effective ones. The keyword effectiveness index is a popular new method of selecting the right keywords to try and find for using the right keyword for your product. The KEI is a formula that is the total amount of global searches divided by its bided price value or the number of times it comes up on Google. Discard those keywords which have a low KEI and use the ones which have a good amount of KEI.

Mobile and Apps

Well, the smartphone and the offspring the ‘selfie’ have both a distinct phenomenon itself, and it becoming more clearer than ever before that the smartphone market will become a bigger market than the desktops in the coming year, as portability is more convenient. This has prompted digital marketers everywhere to come up with a new type of SEO, one that is attuned with the smartphone networks and its quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Apart from the obvious update of making your website responsive as well as fully functional in a mobile device by means of responsive designing and other coding, there has now developed a whole new branch of SEO around mobile Apps. The Mobile App SEO’s most conspicuous aspect is App Indexing, where Google will itself suggest a list of Apps that you is recommended to be installed whenever a query is performed. If you have a App, you should make sure to index like you would a website, as Google will summon those Apps which is related to the query.

 

An App Deep linking functionality will also be a most prominent feature along with Indexing. The deep linking functionality will help people to navigate to those parts of the same App which they specifically wish to see. This process might seem relatively complex compared to others, but this section can be easily created by an App developer. This means telling Google which sections of the App are used for which specific purpose. This will increase the authority of your app, prompting Google to put your App higher up in relevant searches.

Brands

Branding as a ranking factor is not really something we can gauge with any criteria, but nevertheless, the reputation of a brand is directly linked to its success in the SERP Ranking. Google’s Search Equality Evaluator Guidelines says that: “A very positive reputation can be the reason for using the High Rating for an otherwise Medium page.”

For creating a brand with some depth and reputation will directly contribute towards an increased click-through rate from SERP’s as well as foster visitor engagement and loyalty. Defining a brand will help you find a niche specific for the long tail keywords that you had gathered through the keyword research.

When someone says brand, what comes into mind is not something that is tangible or concrete, but instead something that is abstract and made up of several components, or it might even be those individual components: Brand Name, Colours, Logo, Fonts, Editorial Voice, Imagery, Look and Feel. These are the components that will make your brand and using them you can go about and start to define yourself as distinct from your competitors by:

• Core Differentiators: What makes you different from other competitors and why the customers should go to your company instead of any other?
• Core Values: What are the essentials principles upon which you have based your company?
• Defining Customer Personas: Who are your ideal customers that you wish to target?

Moving Towards HTTPS

This trend has been gaining traction in the recent years and it is slowly becoming an indispensable aspect towards securing the safety over your website domain as well as getting a greater ranking. It is basically a technology for transferring data between your site and the Web servers with an additional layer of encryption called SSL (Secure Socket Layer) to make data transfer very secure.

But migrating towards an https should be done prudently because several things related to SEO could easily go wrong but doing it should be a priority as Google has publicly declared going about saying SEO without https is alright is totally wrong.

Social Media

This one goes without saying, but I’ll emphasis it once again, the medium is only going to get bigger and get bigger and in every nook and corner of the social media realm lays opportunities you an avail of. Facebook is obviously the leader, and it is constantly modifying its pages and structures to incorporate business friendly models. Moreover, Facebook is also introducing new features into its structure so that more companies can integrate it or choose it as a means of distributing content; a case in point – Instant Articles for publishing Articles and Content. Facebook even claims that it even loads faster than all the other articles when using the Facebook mobile App.

Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, Linkedin, and Youtube are all receiving more views and audience than ever before, and if you haven’t already made strides in creating your own marketing efforts here coupled with SEO Tactics, you will be definitely missing out on a huge chunk of the potential for success.

Guest Blogging

This is related to the first point specified here, creating original content and displaying it in other websites in the form of a guest blog. A pre-requisite for guest blogging is to have an original, good quality article that is not of spammy or plagiarized.

Google especially rewards that content which does not abuse the guest blogging opportunities by blatantly soliciting for posts that will have backlinks; it rewards the content which is undeniably new and fresh and that which will look towards building a long lasting and productive relationship with that high quality.

Augmented Reality and Internet of Things

Google has purchased the Nest Inc for 3,2 billion dollars in cash. This acquisition is important because this represents that one of the biggest technology firms in the world has recognized the importance of this new technology in the very near future. The SEO emerging from this field will mostly be Residential SEO, where home appliances will be fitted with the capacity to retrieve information based on search queries. This would mean your company’s name and brand logo coming up on a smart refrigerator when some makes an inquiry about a certain food. The result is instant embedding.

When it comes to Augmented Reality, an application of SEO would be when a shopper inquiring, on an augmented reality device, sees a mall. The visual of the mall will be super imposed with many images of the companies which are residing inside the mall, this is where an AR oriented SEO will come towards fruition in promoting a business in this new realm.

Of course, the map is still being drawn in the field, and when avenues are being found, SEO opportunities will only continue to grow. In the next old fundamentals will still hold sway in the SEO World and the Internet Marketing by extension, but as new technology and changing patterns are also factored, we see that certain changes need to brought about in the way business is conducted, and also an awareness of changes will only benefit those involved. One thing that remains an absolute is of course, original quality content – never compromise on that aspect.