What are the most recent top search engine marketing trends?

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Every day the leading search engines like Google are developing their already complex algorithms and general patterns for even more. Among the strongest top search engine marketing trends, comes the progress on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). In fact, AMP is a new web framework adopted in April 2016. Developed by Google for better user experience, AMP open-source protocols are designed to provide a nearly “instant” load time to deliver extra-fast web navigation for mobile devices.

Today Google keeps the efforts in creating more and more content in the AMP-oriented format, because the lion’s share of all web searches (about 60%) is carried particularly through portable devices like smartphones or tablets. However, implementing a new technology usually needs further consideration and much more efforts of busy webmasters.

AMP vs. Good-old Responsive Web Design. What’s the Difference?

Though, the AMP open-source protocols are remaining within a subset of HTML, leaving aside its mixed bag of optimization techniques. It means that the existing website doesn’t need any design or remodeling works to get supported in AMP. So the framework itself shouldn’t become any sort of alternative to replace the major use-proven technologies of Responsive Web Design.

Top Search Engine Marketing Direction to Only Quality Content

By late 2016, Google search algorithms have become even more sophisticated, receiving a boost from artificial intelligence. I’m serious, as modern machine learning integrated into the current search algorithms makes. And here comes a concept of RankBrain designed by Google to make the existing search experience even more intelligent and user-friendly. It works for providing us only most relevant information in Google SERPs. So, we can reasonably expect a new round of combat race for every webmaster and website owner to add even more unique and informative writings to their content, in line with updating and reviewing already existing pages.

What’s more - according to the major insights in the industry, Black Hat SEO and the other shady tricks (like paid backlinks in bulk) are expected to become even less effective through this year. This means even stronger requirements for new content solutions, such as imperative use of taglines, denser and smarter articles, as well as only competent guidelines and reviews.

Personal Branding with Branded Links

Now Google starts rewarding creative platforms for having their URLs branded with the unique logos. Yes, it’s eye-catching for users and better for building stronger name of the business. At the same time, these featured URLs will be now more attractive to the major search engines, thus giving creative webmasters even greater prospects for higher ranking.  

Among the ruling key performance indicators considered by the search engines, here comes the improved idea of repetitiveness, or would-be habituation. With respect to link building, it was illustrated by Fortune 500 listing, i.e. for the industry giant Pepsi using “pep.si” for links pushing their agenda through the Web. And it’s doing really good, as according to the recent research, such short branded links are boosting CTR by over 30%, not to say they are extremely fitting the realm of social media with commonly limited post length.