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And we'll give you some quick SEO tips for 2020 at the end.
So let's get started.
First one is Domain Authority.
What exactly is domain authority?
Well Domain Authority is the credibility of your website, and is used to determine how
trustworthy you are, and how trustworthy your site is.
In earlier times, Domain authority used to be all about Backlinks, but it is not the case now.
Now Google evaluates your site based on EAT.
What is EAT?
It stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In short, EAT.
In many ways, EAT is the Domain Authority 2.0.
Last year, Google's quality rater guidelines really focused on EAT. It was important even
before but in recent times, it's importance seems to have increased.
In Google's How Search Works report, they clearly mention that they want to rank reliable
sources.
So how can you increase your EAT score?
Here's how.
First, be an expert of your topic. Or hire one.
Because if you hire random freelancers to write your content, you will be in trouble.
Since Google has said that they only rank credible sources, things written by random
freelancers don't have much of a chance being featured on the first page.
Google goes as far as to say that medical content needs to be written by medical health
professionals.
Google is also making use of softwares to figure out who's behind a certain piece of content,
making this a tough thing to fake.
Therefore it's important to be credible in 2020, if you want good rankings.
Be transparent. Google points out that they expect most of the websites to have some sort of
information about who is responsible for the website.
This means, having a thorough About Page, easy to find contact page, references and
external links to sources, privacy policy and terms of service and author bylines on every
article. Another step is to get cited.
Most of Google's evaluation of EAT happens off of your website, which makes sense since
anyone can claim to be an expert otherwise.
But getting other websites to agree with you? That's a whole different story. Infact Google
specifically mentions this in their guidelines that one website says one thing about itself and
other reputable websites disagree with what the website says, trust the external sources.
So you need to get cited in lots of different external websites. Reputed websites. Second, be
specific to a particular niche or field. Your site, as a whole, needs to be associated with a
certain topic. Which again comes down to off-site mentions.
Number three.
The rise of videos. Online videos is all the rage right now. According to Cisco, online video
will make up 80% of all online traffic by 2021. And that is a really big deal.
Therefore video should be a part of your digital marketing plans, here's how you can use
video to improve your SEO.
Video featured snippets.
You've probably noticed more video featured snippets in the search results. So here are
three most important things to do to get your video content in a featured snippet.
Organize your content into discrete sections. This is really important, clear sections help
Google understand the content in your video. And this in turn makes it easy for them to use
different clips from your video in a snippet.
Second is optimizing your video for SEO.
Google uses your title, description and tags to figure out what your video is all about. So
apart from publishing videos with well defined content, it is also important to optimize your
videos for SEO. A study of 165 videos found that 80% of all the videos in featured snippets
contained a keyword in the title.
Third, a transcript. It is really important to provide text based transcript of your videos. The
captions generated by YouTube are really great, but not perfect. Hence it becomes
important to upload a well crafted transcript.
Another important point is to grow your YouTube channel. And if you don't have a youtube
channel yet, you're missing out. YouTube is already the world's largest search engine. And it
is still growing. More and more people are searching for stuff on YouTube than before. It is
really too big a search engine to ignore. And most marketers are too lazy to make a video so
you can get valuable brownie points by making a video. That is if you can make high quality
videos. And it gets better. When you publish seo optimized YouTube videos, you'll own more
Google real estate.
Embed your video content into text based blog posts. That's because people want to see
more content. So it's always better to embed videos into your blog posts.
Backlinks still remain a key factor for the SEO. SEO is, eventually, all about content and
backlinks. Without amazing content, you'll never be able to get backlinks and without
backlinks, you'll never be able to rank on the first page of Google. Backlinks are that
important. Therefore quality content and backlinks should be the main focus of your SEO.