Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) needs to continuously evolve to stay relevant and provide the consumer with exactly what they need. Over the years, we have seen Google implement numerous updates that allowed their engine to keep up with the times.
Due to these updates, strategies that worked last year could be outdated now, and for a successful campaign you need to know how to implement new techniques. Here are some of the things that have changed in the past to show you how SEO has evolved throughout the years.
Keywords
Google used to be all about the keywords and focussed heavily on singular keyword ranking data. This meant that black hat SEO (the unsustainable, “bad” kind) could use techniques such as keyword stuffing – where a web page is simply filled with repeating keywords – to increase their search engine ranking placements. However, today websites are penalised if they do this. Rather than focusing on one keyword, the best practice is to think of long tail searches, which accounts for 70% of searches.
Content
Old SEO practices allowed you to create content with no regard to its quality. This meant that thousands of people were creating pages that were stuffed with keywords but didn’t actually provide readable or useful text. Today, it’s important to make sure that your web pages have high quality content that is of value to your target audience.
Link Building
Black hat links and “spammy back links” used to work. An old Google algorithm allowed you to post links on other websites indiscriminately, and a lot of black hat SEO organisations even used automated systems that completed the task in seconds. However, today this no longer works and high quality back links are preferred over the quantity. One way to do this is to write guest blogs on press release sites.