3 Important SEO Questions Explained Through Infographics

Online marketing success relies heavily on your business' ability to get found. 

With Google processing over 40,000 search queries every second, you want to be sure that when your prospects go searching for resources, yours turn up. 

But how does it all work? What practices are still relevant? What will the future look like?

Aware that there are more questions than there are answers, we scoured the web to turn up the following infographics dedicated to simplifying SEO.

While each one is packed with valuable insights, we've detailed a few key takeaways under each to help you walk away with the most actionable tips. 

What's the difference between the old SEO and the new SEO?

(Source: QuickSprout)

With SEO changes occur so rapidly that it's often time hard to separate what you should be doing and what you should be dropping. With that said, last year's SEO strategy simply isn't going to cut it. 

While your boss may be apprehensive about your "newfangled" strategies, it's important that you have the insight to back up your efforts. After all, if you keep up that spammy link building, you're putting yourself at risk of dropping out of search engine results pages entirely. 

Sounds counterproductive? That's because it is. 

When it comes time to loop in your boss, make sure your focused on dissecting your analytics, researching keywords that align with your ideal audience's needs, and creating content that provides value. 

How does Google crawl and index web pages?

(Source: QuickSprout)

First things first, let's answer the two outstanding questions at hand:

What is Google's index?

According to the infographic, Google's index is a list of website pages that Google has both crawled and cached. 

How does Google crawl your site?

Google employs "spiders" that are responsible for traveling from page to page to evaluate the content and index pages so that they will turn up in search results. 

Now that you know how it works, it's important that you identify any and all mistakes you're making on your website that could potentially prevent Google from carrying out this process. Check it out:

• Incorrect robots.txt file
• Badly configured "htaccess" file
• Poorly written title, meta tags, & author tags
• Incorrectly configured URL parameters
• Low pagerank
• Connectivity or DNS issues
• Domain with a bad history

What does the future of SEO look like?

(Source: CJG Digitial Marketing)

As we mentioned before, SEO is ever changing, making it equally as important to know not only what to do now, but also what to anticipate for the future. 

Staying a head of the curve and keeping tabs of emerging trends will make it easier to pivot your SEO strategy accordingly and minimize the hassle. 

To help make this even more digestible, we sorted through the infographic and pulled the top 8 most important takeaways below:

• 1) Create high-quality content that is relevant, engaging, and targeted to your ideal audience's needs.
• 2) Social signals was noted as second only to content as a top ranking factor for search. 
• 3) In 2015, website security will become an important search ranking factor.
• 4) By next year, there will be as much as 50 billion local searches using mobile devices.
• 5) In 2015, conversational search will become increasingly important as asking questions aloud through browsers becomes more popular. 
• 6) Businesses should be focused on earning brand mentions to increase credible link building. 
• 7) Rich text that includes visuals will be given priority in SERPs over web pages that contain just text.
• 8) In 2015, the focus will no longer be on mere keywords, but rather more important elements that impact ROI.

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