Google’s algorithm changes constantly, so it is essential to always stay up to date.
We know that it is necessary to earn the best possible position in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page, i.e. the results page on Google) because the vast majority of users inevitably click on the first results (if you want to deepen the subject, I refer you to this published study on Smart Insights).
Undoubtedly, there are sites that get most of their traffic from other channels, without making any particular SEO efforts. For example, bloggers who have a strong presence on social media or sites of major brands.
In any case, knowing the basics of SEO and gradually implementing them on your site over the long term will greatly benefit your online presence.
Tips on how to do SEO in 2021.
Doing SEO in 2021:
1) Optimize your site for “mobile” devices:
In addition to making sure your site is fully responsive in the first place, and therefore that you choose the right WordPress theme, there are other things you can do.
AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages:
More and more people are accessing the web from their mobile and Google is rightly adapting their algorithms so that sites optimized for mobile devices are better positioned.
Indeed, Google has even decided to restructure its indexing rules based on “mobile-first”, ie taking into account first of all the mobile version of websites.
One tool that can help you with this is definitely AMP. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and it is a project that aims to deliver content to users who surf the web from mobile even faster.
If you’re interested in adding it to your site as well, try AMP’s WordPress plugin.
Limit pop-ups:
One of the elements that most disturb mobile browsing are the full-screen pop-ups. For this reason, Google will penalize sites that show full-screen, intrusive pop-ups and / or that must be closed by the user himself before he or she can continue browsing.
However, it is important to note that sites that show pop-ups required by law, such as the banner for the information on cookies, are not penalized.
However, all other pop-ups, for example promotional ones or those that invite the user to subscribe to the newsletter, should be reduced so as to occupy about 20% of the screen of a mobile device. Pop-ups shouldn’t disturb your browsing and should be easy to close.
2) Keep posting long content, even less frequently:
Google is also taking care to provide content that is as quality as possible and is truly valuable. For this reason, doing SEO in 2021 also means paying some attention to what you write and also to what you write.
The length of a text, although it may not always be synonymous with quality, is still a sign of a certain level of depth of content.
For this, it would be better to publish a 2000-word post, very thorough and exhaustive on the subject matter, even just once a week, rather than 7 posts of 300 words.
It is obvious that everything helps: publishing a 300-word post is undoubtedly better than not publishing anything for months and months, but the ideal length of the posts – for these to be SEO optimized – is about 1600 words.
3) Don’t overdo it with keywords!
The concept of optimizing your content for a keyword is always valid. That is, choose a topic for your post, select a keyword and enter this keyword in the title, in the meta description, in the text, etc. A plugin like Yoast SEO can help you a lot.
What is changing, however, is that the frequency with which the keyword appears within a content is becoming less important, to the advantage of synonyms.
Now this is no longer necessary.
I understand how complicated this can be sometimes and in fact many of the clients who come to us for our SEO services make – among other things – this mistake too… very very often!
Just keep in mind one concept: Google is focusing more and more on quality and user experience, so improve the readability of your articles by using synonyms and therefore a more natural language (more intended for humans and less oriented exclusively to bots) will surely come. awarded.
4) Take a look at Featured Snippets:
You may have already noticed that for some time Google has introduced Featured Snippets, in Italian called Featured Snippets in the search. In a nutshell, these are web page snippets that are placed prominently at the top of the Google results page.
A Featured Snippet content gets huge exposure, so it’s good to be aware of it because it’s very important for SEO in 2021.
Below is an example of a featured snippet where the portion of an SOS WP post is shown:
How are the contents that appear in the area dedicated to Featured Snippets selected?
In reality, there are no rules that guarantee that a content snippet appears in the featured section of the SERP.
That said, there are guidelines you can follow to increase the chances of your site being featured:
First, try to position your content well. The ideal would be in first position!
If the content in question is a tutorial, try using a bulleted list for the various steps.
Obviously, optimize the content appropriately for the keyword you have chosen.
In some cases, the Featured Snippet feature can help significantly increase organic traffic to the featured page. This is especially true when only the first steps of a tutorial or the first part of an explanation are highlighted.
However, there is a possible negative effect: it is true that your visibility will increase significantly, but if the user believes that the response provided by the snippet is exhaustive enough, they will not click on the result, and therefore the traffic on your site may decrease.
If you’re worried that this will happen, you can still fix it with a little trick. In fact, it is possible to disable the functionality by adding the tag to the page:
5) Install an SSL certificate on your site:
An SSL certificate allows you to encrypt the information that is sent from the user’s browser to the server where your site is located. This is to protect sensitive data that could be intercepted during communication between browser and server.
For some time now, Google has begun to ‘reward’ sites that adopt this type of security measures, so this is also essential for doing SEO in 2021.
I also noticed that more and more users are paying attention to the security level of websites.
For example, if you use Google Chrome and have done the latest update, you will notice that now for sites that have installed an SSL certificate, the words ‘Secure’ appear very clearly in green in the navigation bar, on the left of the URL.
Either way, adding an SSL certificate to your site is usually pretty straightforward. Many hosting providers already offer it as an included service (for example, even basic plans on Site Ground have access to a free SSL certificate).
For a higher level of protection, it is possible to purchase premium SSL certificates which cost starting from 55 euros per year. Once the certificate has been purchased, Site Ground’s technical team will take care of installing the certificate. Want Free website Analysis Click Here
All major providers offer SSL certificates, so I advise you to evaluate the options made available by your hosting service.
If you need help with SSL certificates, activate WordPress Support and we’ll get back to you within an hour.
6) Follow the basic SEO optimization rules:
The advice above is based on the latest SEO news. However, there are some basic rules that always remain valid. For example:
- Publish quality content;
- Optimize images;
- Make sure your site is fast.
- And others that you can find in this guide where 50 tips on how to do SEO on WordPress are collected.
Conclusion:
In today’s guide we have collected tips on how to do SEO in 2021. I hope these tips will be useful to you and help you better position your site on Google and other search engines.