Stanley Damon emailed me this today.  It is a chart created by Moz and based on their inside knowledge, their testing and finally it captures the insights of over 150 experts interviews on the future factors that’ll affect rankings in the next 12 months.

Its a lot of data to simulate all at one time so i am going to send out a 7  tweets on those that I think are most relevant.

Mobile is Hot

I think we all know that by now, but it tops the chart for influence in 2016. Responsive Webdesign we believe will lead the pack as the web continues to gain in performance that is getting close to matching what a native app can do. At the same time people don’t really use more that 5 apps and they don’t care to download lots of apps. Travelers especially are just not going to download a hotel website app, especially as they will view 20 or more sites before they book. Apps are great for special service but they are not essential for the typical website RWD is a better solution for websites if it is done well.

Paid Links fail

What is not working is my number 1 interest.  So I’ll start of with the demise of paid links. They just are not going to work as they once did!  Google knows most of the time which are paid and which are not.  Its OK to advertise, advertising paid links are part of normal commerce; but links that are bought are not. It’s a fine line but, Hey, you know who makes the rules!

45% of the respondents said that topical relevance of links will have an increased impact, while 14% agreed that raw incoming links based on domain authority will have a significant impact on Google’s algorithm.

OnPage SEO is up

It is no surprise that on-page SEO and mobile friendly web design are key factors for the future.
Speed is another factor that is gaining in influence so be sure to optimize your images. https://tinyjpg.com/ is fast and very effective – its also free so drop your large images in and see how they dramatically decrease in size with little loss in  clarity.

Social Media Influence is down, sort of!

A bit surprising is the fall off of Social Media. But as Moz says “Social and brand features including Facebook total count and shares on Google+ (both at 0.27) show some positive correlation with rankings, and Moz notes that “although there is strong reason to believe Google doesn’t use social share counts directly in its algorithm, there are many secondary SEO benefits to be gained through successful social sharing.”

Keywords are falling

Keywords are falling in influence. That is no great surprise and we are all looking for alternatives. In our own development we are moving to Behaviour Responsive Design featuring personality traits rather than keywords which are clearly falling in influence. See http://holidays.barbados.org for an example of a new travel planning approach that uses personality to personalize shopping. The Moz analysts noted that “related terms, high semantic density and relevance of the text are much more important than keywords.

Check twitter daily to get the details of SEO ranking factors in 2016! https://twitter.com/irclay

I don’t think it would be nice of me to  share the email from Stanley but it is packed with good insights. Check out his link below. I am not promoting it or recommending what he does. He has been around for a long time offering forum links. You have to pay for them and I don’t do that right now.

Stanley Damon,
www.ForumLinkBuilding.com