Tis the season to reflect and be thankful! Luckily, there’s a lot to be thankful for in the world of SEO this year. As always change happened, updates were made, and panic buttons were hit. Regardless of the added stress and pressure SEO’s get from year to year, there is still plenty of reason to have gratitude. I’m talking about for more than just your job.

Not in any particular order, the below reasons are worth adding to the list of things you’re thankful for at the Thanksgiving table this year, or at least high fiving over.

Thankful For Search Engines

Where would we all be without search engines? The ability to search for information online is a huge reason why most digital marketers have a job. Not to mention, any marketer can appreciate the use of search engines as we conduct research. Search engines do make our cyber worlds go round, and for that we are thankful Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Facebook.

Thankful For Links

Pass the juice.. The link juice!

We can all cheers to links this Thanksgiving, both to the good and the bad links. We can cheers to the good links because they help give our websites authority and improve rankings. External links is like dropping a vote in the ballot for your website to search engines. The more external links you have the more popular and legitimate a website seems, but only if those external links are from reputable websites.

An external link from the city council linking to Forbes.com isn’t as helpful as TIME Magazine linking to Forbes.com is. Websites with similar content and within the same industry is the best type of sites to get external links from.

This year we can also cheers to bad links. Thanks to bad links, competitors who practice spammy SEO tactics are being penalized and their rankings are taking a beating for it.

Let me know how Page 2 looks!

Thankful For Penguin 4.0

It only makes sense to be thankful for Penguin 4.0 if we’re going to be thankful for links. The cyber world is an incredibly large place. There’s tons and tons of websites, like well over 1.1 billion websites and counting. That’s quite a lot for Google to filter through, but with their team of super bots and super geniuses they’re able to do it and now in real-time.

Penguin 4.0 was a direct effect to penalize the many websites who are practicing black hat techniques. Which, as long as you’re not doing spammy SEO or hiring a firm that does so, you should be good to go.

One big thing anyone can be thankful for with Penguin 4.0, is that Penguin 4.0 is in real-time. Therefore, if your website is penalized you’ll know a heck of a lot faster and be able to get the issue fixed quicker than before. Audit your links frequently so you can track any issues right away.

As long as your backlinks are clean, and not spammy, Penguin 4.0 will be a benefit to you.

Thankful For SEO Tools

The AuthorityLabs SEO tool is one of the many tools that we can be thankful for it’s existence. Track rankings, discover new keywords, and monitor the competition all using one tool. The all-in-one type tool is incredibly handy and more cost effective in the long run since it eliminates the need to purchase multiple tools.

It’s tools like these that make SEO’s lives easier, a lot easier. Google also has many tools that contribute to SEO’s like Google Page Speed Insights, Google Analytics, and Google’s Webmaster Tools. Being able to work faster and smarter is surely something SEO’s can be thankful for.

Thankful For Content

SEO is all about improving rankings, increasing conversions, and providing relevant solutions to search queries. Together, SEO and content marketing work hand in hand to make these things happen. Through content, websites can establish an authority on a specific topic, niche, or industry and connect themselves with relevant searchers. When this connection is made SEO is improved through rankings and authority.

Specifically, we can be thankful for bloggers and writers, good writers. Bloggers are great for outreach and help SEO’s create new link relationships. Writers make great keyword-rich content that searchers are actually looking for and provide the needed content for blogs, web pages, and more. Together, bloggers and writers are two very big things SEO’s have to be thankful for.

Thankful For Social Media

Whether or not you sit on the side of the fence that believes social media affects rankings, social media does go hand in hand with SEO. Sharing new and old content on social media is a great way to increase the content’s views. Social media is also great for increasing overall website traffic when you share links in post captions and increasing eCommerce sales using social media advertising.

Another reason to be thankful for social media is because it provides another platform for businesses to engage with their customers and provide customer service. It’s becoming more and more common for customers to ask their questions through tweeting a business or posting on a Facebook Business page, versus picking up the phone and calling. This gives businesses another opportunity to connect with it’s customers and respond in a faster and more direct method.

Thankful For Mobile Traffic

Did you know that 48% of consumers start mobile research with a search engine? Hello mobile SEO! Mobile traffic is making up a majority of the search traffic nowadays, and that’s a good thing. Over 56% of traffic to the top sites is coming from mobile devices, a percentage that keeps on growing and is expected to grow to 75% in 2017.

People are searching more actively on the go, instead of waiting until they get home and possibly forgetting to make a purchase or look up an article they intended to. All of this added traffic is giving SEO’s plenty more work to do, and for a good reason.

Mobile traffic has redefined the playing field with #Mobilegeddon, responsive design, and now Google’s AMP and we’re only at the beginning. There’s much talk among the industry that voice search is going to eventually surpass typed in searches, which means there is even more room for mobile SEO to grow.

Thankful For  Wordpress Plugins

WordPress can be one of those complicated “simple” solutions for website development. Overly packed themes slow websites down dramatically and can hurt rankings. Photos take up too much space and affect page load times, especially for e-commerce websites.

Thankfully, there is a plugin solution for just about any WordPress issue.

Yoast SEO is one of my favorite plugins to be grateful for. It’s actually an easy and simple way to optimize a webpage with basic SEO: keyword data, meta tags, descriptions, and gives your page ratings and tips for improving the SEO. Once you see a green button next to a page, you know you’ve “made it” in terms of properly optimizing the page.

Thankful For People

Without people, no one would search and there would be no reason for SEO’s, let alone digital marketing. The need for information from people is what makes the cyber world go round, and it’s definitely something we should be thankful for.

Put aside your negative thoughts towards how people respond online, or how silly people may search for queries online, and start thanking them for their existence and online activity.

Hey, you reading this! Thanks for existing :]

What are you thankful for this year, SEO’s?