SEO continues to grow and grow, and 2021 looks set to be one of the most significant years yet for the marketing technique. What do I need to know? That's a fair question, so let's get stuck into some thoughts straight away.

Here's an SEO checklist for 2021, so you can see what you need to consider:

  • Use more visuals
  • Blog around
  • Keywords are key
  • Check your meta tags
  • Mobile becoming primary
  • Link strength

Let's take a look at three of these factors in more detail.

The Emergence of Video

One of the biggest and perhaps surprising 2021 SEO techniques seems to be video and other visual elements having more importance. It appears that search engines are catching on and rewarding pages that have attractive visuals. If you haven't thought about using video, then now is the time.

Speaking of visuals, the actual design of your website could actually play a key role within SEO going forward. There are many factors regarding user experience design that affects SEO rankings, such as the load time of your site.

For a mobile optimized site, consider using an AMP tool (otherwise known as an accelerated mobile page), as they will strip down your website to their bare minimum. Don't worry, though; your site won't be helpless. The important content will remain. The main benefit is that your site will load quicker.

Google loves sites that work quicker. Depending on what you've used to make your site, there may be readily available AMP plugins ready to go.

Blogging, Blogging and More Blogging

As you can probably tell, blogging is still an important SEO tool in 2021. It's not gone anywhere, and it will continue not to go anywhere.

If you don't already, you should know how to promote your blog, or else your lovely information and content will go unread! There are many new emerging ways for you to do this.

For example, you could augment your old blog posts. Using analytical data, you'll be able to find blog posts which perhaps over a year ago were performing well. They will most likely lose their SEO rankings for containing outdated information from sites and started being outranked by fresher content.

This can be difficult to do, especially if you've got many blog posts with almost unusable information. Try to find some lovely past writings and content of yours that will only require some slight tweaks, rather than completing redoing the entire time. As at that point, you may as well just create a brand-new blog post.

On the topic of blogging, you should introduce guests from time to time. Not too much, however; it is still your blog, after all. Guest posting allows you to increase content and potentially even backlinks too.

You can also completely flip this too and go to sites as a guest blogger yourself. This gives you more creative freedom to get backlinks to your site.

Check Your Linking Over and Over

We can't talk about SEO without talking about linking; otherwise, what are we doing? We know that SEO is important, and that trend happily continues into 2021. You absolutely must get the content right to make the link blend in.

If you're writing content and just dropping in internal and external links without context for the sake of linking, then the google overlord will punish you…