Search Engine Optimization, or commonly known as SEO, is one of the staples of digital marketing. Without it, online endeavors will be moot as they will not garner needed traction. It’s pretty much where most digital marketing efforts revolve around but did you know that when SEO was just starting it is a process that is not really pondered on and people just do it for the sake of it. sometimes it even becomes a little suspicious as digital marketers had to go such length just to secure any SEO returns.
Now, more than 20 years after its first conception, SEO leads as a catalyst for all online marketing undertakings. They say that to understand something completely, you need to know its past—and so, this is a brief tracking of SEO changes throughout its monumental run.
Content is refined
When SEO was just starting, digital marketers tend to stuff keywords in content, prioritizing density more than correct placement. With this practice, content is not really that substantial and it’s even unintelligible to an extent. They were merely there just to make way for keywords. This changed when Google put an end to keyword stuffing and paved the way to the rise of good content, where keywords are effectively and creatively inserted into the body. Nowadays, brands have capitalized on refined, useful content. Usually, everyone has blogs that are easy to read, informative, and overall beneficial to the user.
According to recent SEO statistics, 57 percent of marketers acquired clients through blogging which, of course, is laden with decent SEO.
User Experience became a top priority
For the past few years, user experience has been a vital part of retaining potential customers on your site. This is through ensuring that your site fits different devices, that it loads at a convenient speed, and that it provides general satisfaction to the users. Content pruning has also become popular over the years. Now you can find websites that are minimally designed to the core but still has strong SEO. These SEO changes are also a testament to how SEO specialists have transformed throughout the times: they never had to rely on long content or keyword stuffing anymore and they even come up with creative techniques to offer outstanding User Experience.
Link schemes are sentenced to death
We have mentioned how shady SEO can be when it was just starting and one example of this was link schemes. Link scheming is largely a shifty way to gain visits to your site through the use of inauthentic links. Google actually defines them as links that are used “to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results.” Buying or selling links and using automated programs to create links pointing to your site are some examples of link schemes. This is currently a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and you might get banned if discovered implementing it.
Google over the years had killed link schemes and had forced digital marketers to depend only on natural link attraction, thus causing clean link building and giving birth to honest SEO specialists.
Local SEO is given some love
Before—specifically the early 2000s—local SEO is not really given a second thought. It’s just there with less than complete factors to help local searches. This is all reformed when Google started filling them with more features over the years such as carousels and comprehensive NAPs but it really is with their Pigeon update in 2014 that nudged local SEO as something to be concentrate on. Anyway, this Pigeon update gave websites with superior optimization the boost meaning they are usually the first businesses local searchers depending on the area of the Google search. One of the best SEO changes the past few years, local SEO is also something you need to focus on as anyone around you can be a potential client.
Google SERPS changed without you noticing
Search engine results pages or SERPS have evolved right under our noses. If you look at the present ones today, you would not think that they have undergone great SEO changes especially because of their simple, unassuming layout. But they actually changed immensely and are continually updating with every beat. In 2009, Google launched rich snippets or the structured markup you see under webpage results that give further info about the website. Place search and carousels were also added as the years passed by and these are all optimized better by the Knowledge Graph which is a system that caters to users the websites that adhere to Google’s standards.
Mobile is put first
One of the biggest SEO changes recently is the upcoming mobile-first indexing where the mobile site of a certain business is prioritized over its desktop site. While mobile phones have been around when SEO is still taking its baby steps, they are nothing but instruments used for phone calls. Internet is inaccessible those days but eventually evolved and now mobile seemed to have taken over the mantle from desktops and laptops.
Due to this, the SEO of mobile sites has been a primary focus by many digital marketers for years now, ensuring that their sites fit mobile in aesthetics and function. This looking to stay and be the norm very soon. Along with it are multitudes of new updates from Google and other innovations from the digital industry such as voice search and augmented reality; both are looking to be both beneficial to SEO in the future.
Digital marketing has a rich history which would not be possible without the support of SEO. What used to seem as a shady practice had evolved into a marketing process that spearheads the rest of the elements and provides lasting effect, all generated through organic means. To learn more about SEO changes throughout the years, talk to a digital marketing consultant in the Philippines.
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