Search engine optimization has been a part of online marketing since online marketing’s inception, but today’s SEO strategies look very different from how it was done in the early days. Tactics have undergone significant changes over the years, primarily changing alongside Google’s search algorithm updates. Keep reading to learn more about how SEO has changed over the years—and what the best strategies are for today’s online marketing world.
Early SEO Strategies: Keyword and Backlinks
In the early 2000s, SEO was largely driven by exact-match keywords and large numbers of backlinks. Website owners and marketers would stuff pages with repeated terms and build massive numbers of low-quality backlinks to increase their search engine rankings. Meta keywords tags were also a significant factor in search visibility. But the bottom line with SEO in those days was simply quantity over quality.
Google’s Algorithm Updates
It didn’t take Google too long to recognize the spammy marketing tactics businesses used, and to acknowledge that the strategies gave searchers less-than-stellar search results. So, they began cracking down on the spammy strategies with a series of major algorithm changes:
- Panda (2011): This update penalized sites with thin, duplicate, or low-quality content, encouraging websites to focus on depth and original content.
- Penguin (2012): Google began dropping the rankings of sites with unnatural link profiles and an overabundance of anchor text, stopping spammy link schemes in their tracks.
- Hummingbird (2013): This change introduced “semantic search,” which allowed Google to understand the intent behind searches instead of matching exact keywords. So, if a user searched “Mexican food near me,” Google was more capable of recognizing that they were probably searching for restaurants and not recipes.
- Mobilegeddon (2015): This was a fun name for a simple change; with the growing use of smartphones, the Mobilegeddon update began increasing the rankings of mobile-friendly sites.
- RankBrain (2015): Google developed a machine learning system that further improved its understanding of search intent, and allowed it to refine results based on user behaviors.
- BERT (2019): This update improved Google’s understanding of natural language, so it could provide better results for longer, more conversational search queries.
With each of these updates, marketers had to shift their SEO tactics. Though some algorithm updates caused more dramatic changes than others, ignoring any of them could have a major impact on your search rankings.
SEO Strategies Today: Understanding Best Practices
With all of those updates behind us, you might be wondering what the best practices are nowadays for SEO marketing. Modern SEO is built around 3 core pillars: quality content, technical optimization, and user experience. It takes an experienced SEO agency in Kansas City to balance all 3 of these pillars and provide you with the best results from your SEO marketing campaign, so it’s strongly recommended you don’t try to juggle the task on your own.
