In a Google+ hangout yesterday, John Mueller of Google was asked for his SEO tips for 2016.
The question came up at the 26:06 mark into the video. He basically said mobile friendly is still important, look into AMP, Google should get better at JavaScript and always make great quality content.
Here is the transcript as best as I could transcribe it:
Oh man… I don’t have any magical SEO tips for next year. I can’t tell you about that high ranking meta tag that we’ve been working on [sarcasm].But in general, I think, next year you’ll probably hear a lot about from us about AMP, mobile friendly, we’ve been doing over the years. It is still a very big topic and we still see a lot of sites not doing that properly. Those are probably the bigger changes, but other things will definitely happen as well. More information about JavaScript in sites so that we can really figure out how to handle these better in search and make a better recommendation on what you should do or shouldn’t do.
But past that, of course, high quality content is something I’d focus on. I see lots and lots of SEO blogs talk about user experience, which I think is a great thing to focus on as well. Because that essentially kind of focuses on what we are trying to look at as well. We want to rank content that is useful for them and if your content is really useful for them, then we want to rank it.
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at Google+.
