A lot of people are asking whether SEO is dead and if it is not, what its future is. Well, with the need to build an online presence, all businesses (even startups) must pay attention to factors that contribute to better visibility and search engine optimization strategies can act as bridges to a better presence. But mastering SEO has always been elusive. You learn everything that you need to and as soon as you are done gathering all the information, search engines introduce new rules that contradict half of the tips you have read. You end up finding other tips, implement what you have learned and soon, the rules change again.

SEO And Your Business
Running a successful business entails a whole lot of things and one of them is online marketing. To be successful in marketing your business, products and services, you need to optimize your content. How then can you do it if things keep on changing? Below are tips and tricks you can use to stay relevant by leveraging SEO parts that do not change or change a little bit when the general rules are changing.

1. Use the 3 Pillars Of SEO… RELIGIOUSLY
A strong search engine optimization has three major pillars that matter: content, social media, and links.  What has become more pronounced is recent times is the relationship between the three pillars.

• Content
  When you are creating any type on online content, you must do your best to balance between your audience and search engines. Keep in mind that as much as you want to impress the search engines for better ranking, the content you are writing is for your audience and the more readable and interesting it is, the better things will be for your site.
• Social Media
  When you are incorporating your SEO strategies into your website, never forget that you also need to do the same for social media pages. Social media networks have become the best ways businesses can connect with their customers and the best thing you can do is to ensure these pages are visible.
• Links
  Links should not only be about you posting them where you can. It is high time you moved on to getting links from high quality sites. The better the sites you are getting links from, the more solid you will appear.

2. Keywords
No matter how much the rules of SEO change for different search engines, keywords remain constant and their use remain significant. Initially most major search engines focused on the keywords included in meta tags, title, URLs, the density of the keywords among others. Today keywords are more about the topic of the content. This means that your content needs to include more keywords for better ranking by major search engines. For instance, Google, a giant search engine, has researched greatly on keywords and pays attention to important keywords and their synonyms. Using the important keywords and their synonyms in your content gives an impression that the content is highly related to the topic and search engines will give it priority when displaying results.

3. Mobile optimization
Days are gone when mobile optimization strategies were optional. It is now more difficult for any website without proper mobile optimization to rank well on major search engines like Google. The optimization includes things such as a responsive web designs and strategies revolving around mobile content.  There are millions of people who own smartphones and will use these devices to access the internet and find businesses they are interested in. If your website is not mobile friendly such that it loads slowly and the user has to zoom in and out, they will leave immediately and go to another website, most likely one belonging to your direct competitor. Mobile phones have become the new computers and you should target the users of these devices by optimizing your website for mobile and making their time easy.

4. Write Longer Useful Content
A while ago, only 250 words were enough for ranking on most search engines. New changes have turned this around and a lot of websites, especially business websites have suffered a great deal because they rarely write long articles. Keep in mind that the length of the content is as important as the quality. This means that the longer you write the more precise you should be in providing useful information that is relevant to your business or a topic you want to share with your audience.

5. Increase The Load Speed
Though there is no direct connection between the loading speed of your website and the search engine rankings, the slower your website loads, the higher the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the time that visitors spend on your website. While Google might not be interested in your website’s loading speeds, your visitors are. Most internet users are impatient when it comes to waiting for a website to load and this will greatly affect the bounce rate. When visitors are leaving as soon as they open your website, Google will rank you lowly. This can be solved by revamping your website and using designs that will significantly lower the bounce rate.

6. Make Your Website ‘Crawlable’
Until your web pages are crawled, you will not appear on search engine result pages. Your task is to ensure that search engines can easily crawl through your web pages. This is best done using the correct meta tags depending on the pages you want the search engine to crawl through. Make sure you have better internal as well as external links to have updated pages crawled as soon as possible. You should not leave anything to chance when it comes to search engine crawls.

7. Write Fresh Content Frequently
This is one of the invaluable tips because it works both ways. Fresh unique content will not only improve readership, but it will increase the number of times and the depth search engines will crawl through your site. When you are writing your blogs, articles or whatever content, keep in mind that you are generating awareness and the more people read your content, the better your rank will be. Further more, people tend to reduce the bounce rate when they are reading something since they will spend more time on the site and this will only work towards improving your visibility.

In Conclusion
Search engine optimization is an ongoing process that needs constant monitoring. The world of SEO is however in constant change and every business owner with a website needs to keep track of these changes to remain relevant and visible. The above tips will help a great deal in coping with the changes and building your SEO strategies on a solid foundation.