To say that SEO has come a long way since the Dotcom era, it would be an understatement. Back in the day, when the Dotcom era started, people who entered the digital marketing industry only had to be concerned about keywords.
Knowing that search engines only favored keywords, experts started stuffing keywords in their online content. But unfortunately, while that helped to rank web pages on SERPs, it didn’t help users with what they were looking for.
This is where SEO started to change for users. Fast forward three decades to 2022. There are just too many things going on in the SEO industry. Every year brings new SEO practices and trends. What used to work no longer makes sense. At Least that’s what most experts believe.
It is true that SEO has changed quite a lot in the last two decades. But, there are a few things that have remained the same. And to our prediction, it will remain the same.
Most experts believe that SEO is too hard to remain on top…it’s always changing.
But Is It Actually True?
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To accurately answer this question, we must separate the theory part of SEO from the practices we SEO professionals spend our time debating.
In our experience, we have seen that although SEO is changing, the core concept of SEO still remains the same. This we came to realize after taking on many small business projects.
Small businesses with no online presence whatsoever need to start things from scratch. And to our surprise, the practices that brought results were the same practices that we used to follow in the early days.
Everything came down to the following factors.
- Crawlability – Can search engines find your content?
- Site Structure – How do search engines prioritize the website pages?
- Keywords – What is the content all about?
- Backlinks – How does the search engine know your content is trustworthy?
Crawlability
You could have the best content in the world. But, it won’t drive traffic if search engines do not find it. This means that the crawlability of your website matters the most when it comes down to getting your content performed on search engines.
For the search engine to find your content and make it rank on SERPs, a search engine needs to be able to –
- Access the content.
- Read the content.
This is primarily a technical task that has a connection with the site structure.
Site Structure
In addition to making your content crawlable, it is also important to put priority over content scanning. You would want your important content to be scanned before additional non-relevant information.
You might think that every page on the website is equally important. But failing to highlight clearly the website’s hierarchical structure may dilute the impact of the money pages.
Keywords
Once the content is accessible to crawlers, you need to ensure that the crawlers are able to do what this content is all about. This is where the use of keywords comes into play.
We use keywords in the content to tell search engines what the content is all about. This helps search engines to rank our content for the bright search query.
Backlinks
Another long-standing ranking factor in the SEO industry is backlinks. If you think backlinks are a thing of the past, we advise you to stop calling yourself an SEO expert.
Backlinks are important and will remain important for years to come. When looking for something online, how can you be sure of the claims people make online? The only way to authenticate the claim is through their backlinks.
How Can You Prepare For SEO Changes?
Although SEO is changing every day, there are a few things that never change. If you want to succeed in SEO, you need to ensure that you follow these practices. Once you master these, you can try whatever you want, depending on the trend.
Talking about the trend, if you are interested in knowing how the SEO industry will change its shape in the coming year, you can talk to Arnjen. He is a digital marketing expert with a decade of experience under his belt. You will get to know many new things about the industry from him.
