SEO in 2021 – What’s Changing and How to Rank in Search

 

SEO is an ever changing skill, as search engine algorithms are being modified frequently to further refine results offered to users in the search results pages.

As the web becomes more and more overcrowded, it essential to ensure that the best and most relevant results are served to users in search results. One way to do this is to prioritise websites that are constantly useful and relevant, and that will be the focus of upcoming search engine algorithm updates.

Let’s take a look at SEO in 2021.

User Experience

It’s clear that Google has a focus on user experience. And serving websites to user that offer an exceptional user experience.

The search engine’s first page rankings can be highly competitive, so why serve substandard websites to users? Google wants to send it’s users to websites that can provide the information or service requested by the user, in as little time as possible. While also being a consistently reliable and trusted source of the information.

How does Google do this? They use a set of core values to determine a site’s quality:

Expertise – Authoritativeness – Trustworthiness, or ‘E-A-T’

If as a website owner, you can demonstrate these factors within your website and written content, you stand a good chance of ranking high in organic search. Website Performance. Web page loading speed has been a measured metric for ranking for some time. However, 2021 will see the introduction of Google’s Core Web Vitals as an extra measure of website performance.

These metrics are designed to ensure web pages load fully and properly in a reasonable time. Again, it’s something you’d expect for an excellent user experience. The added metrics to be added to Google’s ranking algorithms are:

Cumulative Layout Shift – Measures the shift of elements on a page while loading.

Largest Contentful Paint – The total time to load the largest text or image block in the viewable area of the web page.

First Input Delay – The time it takes a website to fully load for a user to interact ie. click a button.

The user of a CMS such as WordPress will be at a clear advantage when it comes to adapting a website for Core Web Vitals. As many theme and plugin providers offer optimization of both on-page code and caching to allow performance increases.

A popular example is the premium plugin WP Rocket, a plugin developed with performance including page loading speed in mind.

Other SEO Factors for 2021

While the above factors should be the focus of your SEO in 2021, there’s many current optimisation techniques that shouldn’t be ignored.

While Google are prioritising user experience and regular updates of high quality, useful content, the following factors are still hugely important.

Backlinks – Once thought to be the biggest factor in ranking a website, backlinks are links from other websites, and show authority as a kind of referral. If as a website owner you have links from high authority websites, relevant to your industry, you demonstrate your own authority. Comparing this to a competitor with no backlinks, or links from low quality, or spam websites, your website will have a clear advantage.

Page Title Tags – These are the titles of your website pages as displayed in search results. They are still vitally important in showing Google what your website is about. Yes, the content is also very important, but getting the title tag right, including your relevant keywords or phrase is essential.

Image Alt Tags – Image Alt Tags are descriptions to replace an image. They should accurately describe an image to someone using a screenreader. But also, these tags are used to figure out what a picture is showing, how it is relevant to your website, and to rank the images independently in Google images.