Is your website SEO ready for 2017?

2016 has seen a lot of debate when it comes to the value of good technical SEO. Some people even proclaimed that its relevance was over but that soon died down after plenty of evidence came forward proving that solid technical SEO tactics can optimise website performance and result in major traffic boosts. It seems that 2017 is going to be more important than ever for ensuring that your website is SEO ready.

Increase your backlinks

Having an effective strategy for backlinks will be vitally important to improve your search ranking. A good strategy for having a good deal of traffic will soon see your website start to climb search engine rankings, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Google rewards backlinks from authentic sites, but in order for other sites to link to your site, yours will have to be worth it. Put simply, if you want your website to get a link from a high quality site, you have to make sure that yours is high quality too. As you start to build up the number of backlinks, you will start to notice more hits on your webpage.

Mobile friendly websites

Good SEO doesn’t start and end with backlinks though, there’s a whole host of technical tactics that will be essential to ensuring your website performs well in 2017. Just a few weeks ago, Google announced that they are starting the ‘mobile-first indexing of the web,’ put simply, Google stated that they are beginning the process of indexing mobile versions of websites instead of the desktop version. That means that the mobile version of your site will determine how both your mobile and desktop search results rank. So in 2017 it’s going to be more important than ever that you have a mobile friendly site. That could mean overseeing a comprehensive audit to ensure that your mobile site is as SEO friendly as your desktop one, if not more so, as well as tracking your site’s Google mobile rank.

Crawlable resources

Above all else in 2017, it’s going to be important that all of your resources are crawlable. Google is now able to render pages just like modern browsers do. So it doesn’t just come down to making sure your site’s pages are in order. If you have other resources such as JavaScript or CSS, Google can crawl those too. For example if your CSS files are closed from indexing, Google won’t be able to see them properly, so the need to make everything crawlable will be more pressing than ever in 2017.