Which were the most common SEO techniques during 2016?

4 min readJan 1, 2017

Image courtesy of INPIVIC Family at Flickr.com

Every year new trends, new techniques become popular on the Internet when it comes to SEO. Although it is important to keep updated and alert to what may come in the near future, it is not less important to be aware of what has already been done, what has already happened. Knowing the best SEO strategies and techniques during 2016 will allow you to know what is still useful, what becomes obsolete and what ideas can be mixed in order to create new positioning techniques.

Mobile search optimization

One of the most used techniques this year (and will surely be widely used in the next one) is the search engine optimization in mobile devices. The reason for this is simple: the amount of time each person spends using their smartphones per day has been growing and it’s still growing. More and more people prefer to interact or search information on their mobile devices than on their computers (unless they are working, for example.) Therefore, it was a serious mistake for all companies that did not invest time and money in updating their websites for making the interfaces friendly with smartphones. At this point, almost half of Google’s traffic comes from mobile (both tablets and smartphones,) so, if you have not done this, it’s time to start.

An active role in social media

This was another trend in SEO techniques during this year (and actually a constant trend from past years.) An active and quality presence in social networks like Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter has been very important since the objective of it is to position the name of a company, brand and its contents in all possible places where they can find both their customers and current users and the potential ones.

Keywords

Although this is not new, during 2016 a special emphasis was made on keywords. SEO has evolved over the years beyond keywords, so an essential factor that any brand must control is to know which words are the most useful when positioning content. Many companies used Cue, a tool that works similarly to Rank Tracker. It suggests a series of keywords collected through almost twenty platforms and it greatly reduces the SEO work.

Because all software tools become outdated frequently, it is important to be aware of the best tools for finding keywords in 2017. They are extremely useful and help you to save time for focusing on better ideas, for example.

External links

This technique will likely continue to be commonly used because of the current search engine logic and its network objectives. In fact, although it was very popular during 2016, this technique has not changed much for about five years. Incoming links are particularly important because they allow you to generate referral traffic and, in this way, increase the SEO. Including external links in your content and other websites that include a link that leads to your URL is a goal that must be reached too during 2017. Remember that it is better to earn those links in other pages for the excellent quality of their content than simply asking (or even paying) for including them.

Video Marketing

It is a known fact that YouTube is the most used search engine after Google, and Google, of course, is the owner of YouTube. But YouTube is not an isolated island: there are social networks in general, where YouTube content is most shared. Facebook, especially, wants to give more importance to audiovisual content, to the extent that Mark Zuckerberg has said that videos will be more relevant than images and text on this social network in the next five years.

For this reason, during 2016 the use of video marketing significantly increased because, in addition, this technique allows to connect with the user in an impossible way for mere images or text (even if it contains hyperlinks.) The videos allow, for example, to bring users closer to the brands, to how their products are manufactured in real life. This is important to position any business today.

Audience Segmentation and Local SEO

Both techniques were used mixed together during 2016. Segmentation, because it is key to hit target users, as this affects the choice of keywords and thus can offer what the user is really looking for or is demanding. And local SEO was a trend this year (probably in the next one too,) because localization has always been important for Web Positioning, as most mobile devices have the resources to know where we all are, and shares this information to other services. Local SEO was developed this year in several ways: by creating or expanding the Keywords strategy, including locating the business, or by registering the businesses in the main services that offer maps and reviews on products or services.