How SEO Has Changed Over the Last Few Years

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a pretty important part of every business’s online presence. Since the Internet has become crucial in our lives, it’s understandable that businesses should think about their online presence carefully. Creating a website enables you to spread the word about your business and reach people from all around the world.

SEO is a set of activities done with the goal of increasing the visibility of your website. Each time someone searches the Internet using specific keywords, they get a list of results that are the most relevant for those keywords. Your goal is to be on top of the results or at least on the first page. That way you’ll get more visits and consequently, make more sales. Some companies decide to hire their own SEO expert that will work on the website and enhance its visibility, while others decide to outsource SEO services. There are so many sites on the internet explaining this matter. You can learn more here about this topic.

SEO depends largely on Google’s, and other browsers’, algorithms and since algorithms change over time, so do SEO practices and techniques. Here are some of the main changes SEO has experienced over the last few years.

Better content

Even though good content has always been important, now it’s even more so. In the beginning, people would create pretty bad content and use some shady techniques in order to lure the users and increase their popularity, but after the Panda update in 2011, all of that changed and the content rules once again.

Google filters out the spam from the high-quality content and it favors the quality and substance over quantity. Gone are the days of spammy, bad content, and simple keyword stuffing.

Many updates

Google has been releasing some major updates during the last several years keeping optimizers on their toes. With each update, the website was at risk of becoming either more relevant or losing all of its relevancy. That made the past decade extremely stressful for the optimizers that have been working long and hard to keep the websites, well, optimized. Today, there are numerous SEO experts such as the ones from Content SME, that you can ask for help and advice.

The reign of social media

Social media’s popularity has increased drastically in the last decade and it greatly affects SEO as it enables us to distribute the content far and wide. The better your reputation on social media platforms is, the more visits your website will get, and the more relevant you’ll become to Google. You will eventually earn higher rankings thanks to the good content and high traffic.

Keywords lost their significance

In the past, you could simply stuff your website with a bunch of keywords and increase the traffic easily. Often would people hide keywords on their pages in an invisible text in order to improve their ranking but after Google’s Hummingbird update all that changed.

Now, content needs to be deeper and answer some of the most important questions linked to the keywords typed. Artificial intelligence allows Google to define what interests us based on just a couple of keywords.