Business button SEO communication icon web icon2016 is around the corner and along with the New Year celebration and feasting, we should also do something to make our websites competitive so as to maintain the bliss of the New Year. Website and SEO are undividable from each other. Obviously, to make a website competitive, proper SEO is of utmost importance. But it is also true that SEO rules are constantly changing. Take just the last four years and you will observe major changes in the strategies applied by SEO consultants to rank better in search engines. Google Penguin is going to be in full effect by the end of 2015. You may hire a good SEO consultant to make your website compatible to these changes, but you too should have the basic knowledge as a responsible and ambitious owner of a website and business. Here are 5 important tips that will help you succeed in 2016 to rank higher in search engines.

1. Be Careful while Choosing Anchor Texts

The first Penguin update was announced in 2012 and since then it became risky to use anchor texts that match exactly with the search terms. Abuse of anchor texts (whether it is unknowingly or not) can put you to risk of getting punished in 2016 for over-optimization. Therefore it’s recommended to have only 5 to 10 links with a few major keywords and a wide range of anchor texts.

2. Link Building is Okay

It was declared by John Mueller of Google in February 2015 that link building is unnatural and so should be avoided by webmasters. But the recent clarification by Google states that it’s alright to buy, sell or ask for links provided that the Google Webmaster Guidelines are not violated. So, you should better reevaluate your link building policies to make sure that you are not breaching any rules. This will ensure that you are not penalized by Google and your website won’t have to suffer.

3. Create an Excellent Link Profile

Your efforts for creating an excellent link profile can help your online presence for better in 2016. This would be actually much better than targeting a particular page to be ranked on Google. A high-quality link profile is one of the most essential SEO approaches as per experts like Neil Patel. It’s therefore advisable to start creating a better link profile by doing a link valuation through the Google Webmasters account.

4. Keeping Users Engaged to Your Website

Keeping users engaged to your website is extremely challenging. Even more challenging is the fact that low engaging capability may pose a noticeable hazard to your SEO success in 2016, i.e. if your website has a low capability for visitor engagement, it will rank lower in search engines. Therefore you should try to improve your visitor engagement and you can do it by studying the likings and actions of your targeted visitors.

5. Make Your Website Design Mobile-friendly

Google will be considering a website’s mobile-friendliness as one of the most important ranking factors in 2016. Obviously the more your website’s design mobile-friendly, the higher your website will rank in search engines. And of course, sites that are not designed to be mobile-friendly will rank lower. For being mobile-friendly, a website should have certain features like very small text, links that are very close together etc. In short, you have to optimize your site so as to favor users of mobile devices. More and more internet users are making use of mobile devices to access the web, and in that scenario, a mobile-compatible design of the site will improve its performance. Not only this will match Google’s standards, but it will improve your conversion rates too, along with user experience, and that will improve your search engine ranking further.

It is seen from every update of Google that it is trying to become smarter to deal successfully with the deceitful methods implemented by some webmasters for higher ranking. Unethical practices like spamming of sites and finding loopholes from rules which helped people so far in manipulating their ranking in search engines will no longer help them because of the forthcoming updates. Actually, they might incur penalty and drop in rankings. If you have used these types of tactics for getting higher ranks, start improving in your SEO strategies right now so as to save your website from any future problems.