In the world of technology everything is evolving. Rest on your past success and you will be left in the dust. This is just as true for Search Engines as it is for TVs, computers, and smart phones. In effort to always bring better results to their billions of searchers, Search Engines are constantly updating their algorithms, forcing search engine optimization experts to adapt.
Let me take a step back and explain how search engines work for anyone who is thinking, “Wait, what algorithms?” The goal of a search engine is to bring people the most relevant results. Search Engines send out robots that “crawl” your website looking for the metrics they have deemed to be important. Without going into the exact factors that search engines are looking at, here is just a slight glimpse into how SEO services have had to adapt to the changes made to search engine algorithms.
The Beginning of SEO
In the old days of SEO, Google and the other search engines relied heavily on the words used in websites. This made it simple to essentially “master” the algorithms. People took advantage of it by cramming the search terms they wanted to rank for on every inch of their website. This resulted in websites being ranked that had all the right keywords, but were terrible for the consumer trying to read the content on the site. Nobody wants to read a sentence like “Our Denver search engine optimization helps bring our Denver web designed websites to the top of the Colorado search results.” In the long run this was not good for anyone. Users were unhappy with the results so they left, leaving the websites with nothing more than visitors who didn’t stay very long.
This is not to say that there were not SEOs out there doing things the right way: creating quality content and strategically placing keywords in a way that were not intrusive to the readers. Search engines took note of this and saw that these were the websites that searchers were staying on and enjoying so they upgraded their algorithms. In a previous blog, I wrote about the impact of quality websites on SEO. This update to the algorithm has assured that people will enjoy the pages they land on.
SEO Today
Search engines have been rolling out more updates that include social networking in their results. Essentially, if someone is willing to “share” a website with their friends over social networks, it must mean it has high quality content. Now not only do SEOs have to focus on driving high quality links to a website, they have to try to make the content on the website worthy of being shared across social networks.
How to use this Information
The world of SEO continues to change at progress with incredible frequency. Unless you stay completely up to date on what the search engines are doing to improve their algorithms your best bet is to trust your SEO to an expert. Even if you are producing quality content that is focused on your keywords, the algorithms are likely to change in a way that you might not expect. If you have any questions or comments feel free to contact us or post them in the comments section.
