How to SEO Proof Your Website in 2015

This article was updated on August 6th, 2020 at 05:57 am

Change is constant and especially so on the Web. Flash animations were all the rage in websites five years ago but have quickly gone out of favor as Flash didn’t support touch interfaces, lower power devices, and open protocols in the mobile era. The pace of change can create frustrations as websites need to be updated frequently to stay contemporary and competitive.

While you can’t stop change, there are things you can do to keep your website ahead of the curve, gain more traffic, and even expand the current version’s lifetime. These five website features are favorable for long-term Web trends.

Responsive Design

The mobile imperative has really been a key trend in 2014 and will become even bigger in the coming years. Having a mobile friendly website is vital if you value mobile traffic and integral to a higher conversion rate.

Besides providing a better user experience, Google is increasingly favoring mobile friendly websites in their search rankings and showing ‘mobile friendly’ labels in the mobile search results.

HTTPS

While once just the domain of the e-commerce websites, financial websites, and other websites containing personal information, having a secure website is becomingly increasingly important. It provides encryption to help protect against hackers and a greater sense of security and trust for users. Google’s own Pierre Far makes a compelling case for using a security certificate.

Content Rich with an Emphasis on Visuals

For businesses, it’s critical to provide the information your customers are seeking on the Web. This helps your search engine traffic and also provides content for other marketing channels such as social and email.

By having high quality content that draws in and retains visitors, your conversions and sales are likely to increase. And by emphasizing interesting visual content, your social networks can benefit from more shares and followers.

Website Speed

Having a website that loads quickly is of heightened importance as mobile use grows. By resizing images, utilizing caching, and a CDN you can usually speed up your website dramatically in a short period of time.

Implementing Schema.org and Proper Meta Tag Usage

In addition to providing the information your customers are seeking, having a mobile friendly website that loads quickly, and security, you want to make it easy for search engines to return your website’s result for a query. Having SEO optimized title tags and descriptions helps achieve this.

Also, by using structured markup schema, which is supported by Google and Bing/Yahoo, you help the major search engines better understand the information on your web pages and provide richer results.

Conclusion

While it can seem daunting to stay up to date and implement new features into your website, by having a plan and methodically keeping your website up to date, you’ll be better positioned for what lies ahead.

What other features do you think are critical to give websites an advantage over others for 2015 and beyond?