Dynamic SEO — Are Your SEO Practices Evolutionary or Extinct?
When thinking about SEO for your company, it’s best to keep an eye on how the SEO industry has changed over time to make sure you’re practices are dynamic and not extinct.
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is dead!” That’s an oft quoted statement. But experts beg to differ. For them, traditional SEO has evolved to include diverse elements and is now something vastly different from what it was 10 years ago. The face of SEO might have changed, but the target of content marketing companies remains the same and that is to enable access to the appropriate content for the people who search for it.
However, there is no set rule to achieve this end. There is no one way to get the better of search engines. One thing to note in this respect is that changes in Google’s algorithm significantly affect the dynamics of the industry.
How did SEO Evolve?
It didn’t happen overnight of course. The introduction of the Google Panda in 2011 was one of the initial steps in that direction. It marked the start to machine learning for people in the SEO industry. Google took ratings from users on the quality of a website through a set of questions. Then applied machine learning algorithms were implemented to make the feedback applicable to the rest of the web, and Google Panda came into being. With the introduction of Hummingbird, a major search algorithm change was implemented.
After that came the OK Google voice command. It enabled users to speak to the search engine in everyday language and get a response to their query. To achieve this conversational mode of search, Google had to dig deeper and understand the queries and not just the search terms. It thus made a giant leap from words to concepts, and understanding the relationship between words. The seoadviseteam believes that this ushered in the era of semantic search.
Along came RankBrain…
The latest update that the search engine giant came up with is called RankBrain. This form of machine learning leads Google to comprehend and analyzesearch queries, specifically the long-tail queries. Such queries are conversational in nature and therefore something new for the search engine to understand.
With the gradual development of semantic search, Google can now easily determine the nature of the article content. This becomes all the more evident when the article comes up in response to keywords that do not feature in it.
One of the important traditional SEO practices was to include an exact matching keyword or one that was close to it in the title tag. It was believed that this would lead to better rankings. However, with all the changes coming in, Google is now better poised to understand the context of a page. Therefore, marketers need not be focused on forcefully including the keyword in the content or in the title tag.
Wrapping up
Devising a successful SEO strategy today will require quashing of a number of erstwhile practices. Things like inclusion of the keywords or their overuse to attract clicks and their use in titles are passé. The focus is now entirely on what the user wants and not the search engine. Creating insightful and valuable content for the audience is what matters the most, and that’s what will ensure that the readers keep coming back to your website time and again for all their needs.
So, it would be wrong to say that SEO is a thing of the past. Rather we can expect it to evolve with each passing day.
