Start writing hereSEO Tricks To Improve Your SEO in 2016 – Wondering what SEO trends which SEO trends will turn out to be the major hits of 2016? Don’t worry. Here, we bring to you an exclusive exposé on the hottest SEO trends and developments that are set to rock the world in the year ahead. Have a look!

1. Social Content Will Gain Prominence

In the coming times, content from social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will gain more importance on the SERPs.

2. Videos Will Still Rule

We all know that videos are a great way of keeping audience engaged and entertained. But do you know that by using enough videos, you can improve the ranking of your page on the SERPs.

3. Mobile Optimization Will Become Crucial

Is your business website mobile-friendly? Your audience is no longer in one place. People use all sorts of devices such as tablets, smartphones, laptops, phone watches to browse web. Keeping this in mind, plenty of brands went mobile-friendly in 2015. And we anticipate that more brands will take up this trend in the upcoming year. Mobile optimization will become the norm, rather than exception. So, it’s high time you changed the way you conceptualize and create SEO strategies for mobile searches.

4. Voice Search Function a Must

These days, people who are on the go use voice search simply because it is more convenient and safer, especially when someone is driving or multi-tasking. It is becoming a huge part of mobile usage as it has taken away the pain of typing keywords to run a search query. Almost all mobile devices have a voice search functions. The popularity of voice searches has been spurred by Microsoft, Google, and Apple launching their own versions of advanced voice-responsive assistants – Cortana, Google Now and Siri.

5. Content Aggregation will get Bigger & Better

According to Digitalcurrent.com, Knowledge Graph, wiki, local, maps, social media, news, images and videos make for 85% of Google search results. These stats indicates that now people look for sources that provide all relevant information for a particular subject or topic that at one place.

6. The Craze of Mobile Apps Will Grow

According to Tech Crunch, mobile apps account for 52% of all time spent on online digital media. Another report available on the Internet reveals that users spend 89% mobile time using apps. This is the reason for more and more businesses planning to explore the advantage of mobile apps.

7. Local SEO to Become Even More Important

This trend is only going stronger over the years. According to Entrepreneur.com, local SEO is likely to gain solid grounds in the coming days. As a marketer, you have to let Google know where you are located and what you are offering so that your chances of showing up on pages, especially in front of the relevant audience, increase. It is must to have your local pages which will include the name of your business, address etc. with Google, Yahoo and Bing.

On Page SEO Techniques To Rank On First Page in 2016

Before I share the tricks, here are few non technical things that you can in-corporate today:

Improve user-experience
Ensures readers coming from search engine spend a lot of time on your site. If they hit back button quickly, chances are your ranking would drop quickly too.
If you are writing long content, use bucket brigade copywriting technique to ensure users stays on your page.
Use Benefit driven sub-heading to make your content more appealing.

So here is the ultimate list of 10 On-page Optimization factors you should keep in mind while optimizing your blog posts:

Blog Post Title (It makes user clicks + SEO advantage when you use Keyword)
Post Permalink Structure makes article more user-friendly
Heading Tags
Keyword Density
Meta Tags
Addition of Images
Word Count Per Post
Content Interlinking
Linking out to External Websites
Write Engaging Content

On page SEO Checklist:

Here is the final checklist which you need to follow in 2016 to make sure your content rank higher in search engine.

Keyword placement:

Keyword in Title
Keyword in Permalink
Keyword in first paragraph
Keyword in Image Alt tag
Tweaked Keyword in H2 or H3
Bold Important Keywords and related keywords
Italics 1-2 important Keywords
Outbound Link to relevant high-quality sites
Internal links to related articles
Remove all stop words from Permalink
Add multi-media (Video, Slides, Inforgraphic)
Longer the content length, better it is. Minimum: 700 words
Optimize image before uploading (Compress and resize)
Page loading time
Use LSI Keywords (Use SEOPressor plugin to find related Keywords)

Other things:

Use Meta title in less than 65 character
Use Meta description in less than 150 characters.
If using any Social SEO plugin, make sure to add image for Facebook, Twitter. (Take advantage of social graph)
Make sure to have social sharing buttons at the end of post or floating social sharing buttons.
Have related posts after blog posts to lower down bounce rate.

Things not to do:

Not more than 1 H1 tag (Your Post title is H1 tag)
Don’t repeat H2 and H3 Tag
Don’t increase Keyword density by more than 1.25%

Things to focus on:

Try to use Keyword in Post Title at beginning
Use Long tail keywords (You can use up to 65 Character in Post title)
If writing in evergreen niche, remove dates from the posts. (Use Date Exclusion SEO plugin)
Content length: The longer the length of the content, better it is. Though don’t try to uselessly increase the content size.
At the end of blog post, ask users to take action.

SEO Traps to Avoid Google Downranking in 2016

You’ll need to prepare yourself for avoiding the multitude of SEO moves that could get you in trouble. The following are 10 traps you should avoid in SEO 2016.

1. Link building

Google has recently clarified that buying, selling, or asking for links is alright as long as you don’t violate its Google Webmaster Guidelines. Therefore, it would be best to review your current link building approach to ensure that you’re not violating the rules. Otherwise, you might end up getting penalized by Google and your website could suffer long-term.

2. Anchor texts

You should opt to have just five to 10 links to a wide variety of anchor texts and a few major keywords.

3. Targeting single or specific pages

A better link profile can boost your SEO 2016 efforts. It’s a much better approach than targeting single or specific pages to rank on Google. I advise that you start building your link profile by performing a link evaluation through your Google Webmasters account.

4. Unfriendly mobile design

The mobile-friendliness of a website is now among Google’s top SEO 2016 ranking factors. This means that well-designed mobile-friendly websites perform better than those that aren’t optimized for mobile users.

5. Low site user engagement

You could improve user engagement by gaining insight into the preferences and behavior of your targeted audience.

6. Poor user experience

Optimize your website for better user experience by ensuring it fulfills a need. Keep it visually appealing, easy to navigate, and consistently updated with high-quality content.

7. Lacking content creation

You need to focus on catering to users in your niche with a wide variety of fresh content that addresses their queries. Try to come up with at least one or two new posts every week to keep your site up-to-date. This can help you rank higher in Google based on its fresh factor.

9. Interstitial ads

Google recently announced that it’ll soon start punishing mobile sites that use interstitial ads. You may come across a number of sites that give you the prompt to install the site’s app, which can be downright annoying. Visitors are often frustrated, thus user experience is negatively impacted.

10. Misusing reconsideration requests

When you violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines, you get automatically or manually penalized. Once you have made the necessary changes to your site, Google allows you to send a reconsideration request. This process helps you in revoking any manual action taken against you. However, there are several sites that misuse these reconsideration requests and start violating the guidelines again after the penalty is revoked.

Final Words on SEO 2016

With every algorithm update, Google is getting smarter at tackling all the tricks that some webmasters implement for better ranking. Finding loopholes and spamming sites may have helped people in manipulating their search engine rankings before. These unethical tactics will no longer work in their favor with the upcoming updates. In fact, they might end up punished for implementing such tricks and fall in the rankings. If you’re at a risk of getting downranked from Google due to the aforementioned SEO 2016 traps, start making important changes so that you can avoid any future issues.