Well in short everything has changed in SEO!

Compared to when I first started building websites and doing SEO back in 2006 the industry has completely changed and for the better in my opinion. Yes it is much harder these days to get a website ranking well in search engines an in turn harder to get good traffic levels to your website. But using the right methods you can actually get a lot more now than back then simply as more people use the internet.

So what has changed in SEO?

The Search Engines Used:

Back in the day there was a lot more search engines people used: MSN, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista, Excite , Google were not the number 1 search engine with the biggest share by far like they are now.

Page Optimization:

In the old days you could simply spam your keywords and key phases in Title, Description and keywords meta tags. Spam your keywords and key phases in content then hide it from users various ways, often same colour text as the background. Using these methods now will get you nowhere and in fact likely to get your site in trouble.

These days optimizing your title and description is all about improving the click through rate (CTR) of your website when shown in search results. As these are used by Google for ranking purposes and search results are only any use if people are clicking on your website when shown. As for content it should be written for the users reading your site not crawl bots.

Link Building Methods:

In the old days there were lots of easy ways to get more inbound links to your site, link exchanges, directories purchasing links from other site owners. Building blog networks or website networks purposely to point links to your important sites. All these methods are obsolete and will just get you a Google penalty dropping your ranking or even dropped from their index totally.

Now your very limited in ways of getting more inbound links you basically have to create a website people will want to link to naturally because you offer good information on your website or offer a great service that people want to recommend. You can improve your ability to build your link profile by doing some outreach, actually contacting site owners and asking them to link to your site. This often works well if you can find sites with older well-established content that has a couple of links pointing to pages that no longer exist, this way you can contact the site owner saying you read their article found it very interesting but the links were just giving a 404 error would you mind linking to my page instead.

Mobile Optimization

Back when I first started most mobiles did not even have the ability to veiw websites and those that did were terrible at rending anything but very basic sites. So mobile optimisation did not even exist and neither did tablets.

We then moved to having an alternative version of websites to offer mobile users wanting to view sites on their phone but these were usually something that got overlooked and lost their ability to function, changes would be made to the main website and the mobile version just get left behind.

We are now in what Google have called a mobile first era were just having a separate mobile website is not good enough, your sites should be responsive and optimized for mobile users as a priority over desktop users due to the stats now actually show more people are searching on their phone or tablet compared to desktops.

View Towards HTTPS

This is again something which has changed from being something nobody had. To those who had online purchases had to have HTTPS for secure online payments. To a point where not having your site on a HTTPS setup will actually harm your search engine results.

There is also a lot more changes to SEO not in this article but I have outlined some as an example of just how much has changed.

Here at Ram Digital we can help your company website to ensure your following all the latest SEO best practises with our expert SEO consultants.