Election-meddling Russian cyber-terrorists aside, here’s another good reason to enable SSL on your site:

A valid SSL certificate—and thus a HTTPs connection—will show both users and Googlebot you care about fighting off evil hackers.

You know that little lock before URLs? You’ll need it.

The following meta tags will help search engines better understand your content:

But you can definitely help with content discoverability, i.e. on-site and on-page optimization. Here’s how:

Content quality requires expertise and research—if your client’s industry is alien to you, you can’t help here.

Before you create the sleekest of single-page applications, remember one thing: content quality is #1 in SEO .

Before dominating the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) with your SPA, you’ll need to master these SEO basics:

The good news? Some tried-and-tested simple practices will go a long way in boosting organic traffic.

I won’t be explaining the ins and outs of Google’s indexing algorithm here. I can’t do that—and frankly, nobody can. It’s closed source, highly complex, updated continuously, and interprets >200 ranking factors .

So what matters in SEO? What makes a website rank?

This screenshot, taken in Chrome, shows an explicit “Not Secure” label besides this non-SSL website. Now I don’t know about you, but it sure doesn’t feel SAFE to visit Florida.

Don’t be like Florida. Don’t scare off users. Be secure.

Plus, Let’s Encrypt and Cloudflare let you do it for free.

Further reading

3. Mobile optimization 📱

High at the top of “SEO things to keep in mind in 2019” is:

Google uses mobile-first indexing.

Old school desktop Googlebot won’t be the first knocking at your new SPA’s door. Smartphone Googlebot will!

If you have an existing SPA, you can go to Google Search Console settings to see when your indexing crawler switched to mobile.

It’ll evaluate both usability (font size, buttons spacing, responsivity) and performance.

Single-page applications are notorious for their “less downloaded content” advantage. However, be aware that your mileage may vary on mobile connections. A further section will address mobile performance for SPA.

Further reading

4. Performance & user engagement 🏎

Gone are the glory days of backlinks as the #1 SEO ranking factor.

Today’s Google Search algorithm is way more dynamic.

It weighs user-centric factors more than ever. Website speed and user engagement signals are the two big ones here.

Performance

Our collective attention span is shortening by the day. Online searchers are quick to abandon sites and carts.

Google wants to please its users, and slow-loading pages aren’t pleasing at all. They might even get your site penalized, or downranked.

Consider Googlebot’s impatience: the crawler typically won’t wait longer than 5 seconds for a script to execute. Miss that timeout, and you’ll risk content rendering and indexing issues.

Fear not though! Modern development practices for performant, SEO-friendly SPA abound—and they’re all described in a further section.

User engagement

Google now adapts to user-level signals. It often reorganizes SERP rankings by listening to:

Time on page, pages/session

Back-and-forth between results & SERP (frequency + speed)

Click-through rates on SERP

Social signals Freshness + popularity factors Tweets/RT, shares, comments, posts



Google has become incredibly adept at tracking user engagement to ensure its users are getting the results they’re looking for the first time around.

Further reading

5. Authority (backlinks & trust score) 🔗

In the ’90s, backlinks were measured in a “one link = one vote” fashion by Google. A very democratic—and gameable—ranking process.

That’s why, nowadays, you’ll find that artificial, spammy link building tactics lead to severe penalties. Sites disappear from Google Search, along with their organic traffic, when they rely on getting their authority from untrustworthy links.

Still though, building your site authority the right way remains a key strategy in SEO. You can do this by obtaining natural, relevant, topical backlinks from thematically-relevant and trusted websites. The most popular way to do that? Creating valuable content other sites will use as resources (and link to) on their pages.

Some authority factors that’ll influence your Google rankings:

Quality + number of linking domains/pages

Trust Flow (or Trust Score) Simply put: what’s your link proximity to high-authority sites? Media, governments, academia, official directories



Further reading