Google has changed the search engine optimization game several times, and it is important to keep up with the times. You need to make sure you understand that what worked last month might not work this month and how to implement the new SEO strategies. To help you understand how things have changed since the early days of SEO up until today, here are a few ways that SEO has evolved, and how you need to look at your SEO efforts in today’s landscape.
Frame of Mind
It used to be true that SEO was focused on a singular keyword, and was focused on the individual page. You had to keep close track of your search engine rankings to be on the top of your SEO game. Today, though, the focus is more on how users interact with a particular brand, product, or service. Instead of focusing on your search engine rankings, you need to be focused on your Return on Investment (ROI). Where one keyword used to be the main focus of SEO efforts, in today’s environment the first focus is on keyword research, analytics, content creation, and social media shares and engagement.
Content
Under old SEO practices, you could create content for the search engine with no regard to the quality of the content or the relevance to the user’s needs and desires. This resulted in a large number of pages packed with keywords that often bore little relevance to the offer being made. GOOGLE HATES THIS! It bogs down the search engine and provides users with poor information on the information they are searching for. This could happen to you and I everyday. Under the current SEO landscape, however, you should focus on creating content that provides real value to your audience. It should be focused on the audience it will attract, and an emphasis on keeping that audience engaged with the content should be at the forefront of your mind as you generate content.
Link Building
The way link building used to work was you could build “spammy backlinks” or black hat links, and this would serve to increase your page’s search engine result pages. This doesn’t work any longer, and you should instead focus on high quality backlinks. High quality backlinks are developed by building relationships with other blog owners, through creating better content than your competitors and reaching out to backlinks to replace the outdated competition content with your own content. High quality backlinks will allow you to increase high quality traffic to your website while educating your audience.
Keywords
As we said previously, SEO used to focus on singular keyword ranking data. Today, though, when you focus on keywords, you should instead focus on the intent of the keywords. Rather than thinking about a single keyword, you should be thinking about the search user needs and focusing on long tail searches. This is because around 70% of search traffic comes from long tail searches. Using the best SEO plugins will help you focus on the intent of the keywords.
Conclusion
Content marketing has been the biggest game changer in SEO over the years. Most companies that use SEO today integrate content marketing into their strategy, simply because content marketing works to drive stronger SEO results. So begin your new SEO strategies building mutually beneficial relationships with niche industry blog owners and create content that will blow your target market away. You help people and they will help you.
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