Be There For Your Visitors and Google Will be There For You
Being an
SEO in todays world is very different than it used to be. One thing that hasn’t changed though is how SEO relates to the people who actually visit our websites. For SEO’s what matters more than anything else is how Google sees us and rate us, and this is where the change over the last few years has occured.
This change has happened gradually, but the most drastic changes have been during the last 3-4 years. Going back to the creation of Google in the late 90’es, creating a website with the focus purely on the user’s experience would make your site incomprehensible for Google. For Google’s first 10 years not much changed in this department. But the last 3 years has seen some important changes which means that Google’s rating of a website doesn’t entirely focuses on keyword usage, tagging, link building and many other thing which have no value for the visitors. Luckily, Google realized that making algorithm which favors sites which are made for visitors reflects better on themselves, as more people in return will look more positively towards Google.
In this article I will look at some of the
white-hat SEO strategies from 3 years ago, and compare those strategies to how they should be approached today.
On-page keyword usage turn into content strategy
Before when you wanted to high for a keyword, the best strategy was using it in the <title>, the <h1> and maybe even an <h2>, and a few time in the actual text.
Now a days Google has a much better understanding of synonyms. This means that you can use a keyword once and show that it’s very much relevant with other comparable terms. A good recommendation would be using keyword groups and use keywords that have roughly the same meaning. In this way you’ll be relevant to all of them since many if not all of them will be recognized by Google as synonym for all the other keywords.
Additionally it would be a good strategy to use keywords which current and potential customers use. Ask them to fill out a survey and use their descriptions, emotions and needs to create keywords you can build into your website content in a way that relates to them.
On-page structure/tagging is now improved design
Back in 2010 important parts of a website had to be marked up with HTML tags like <h#>, <em> and <strong>. Google would read this as relevant and important text.
Google in 2013 is now able to recognize where text will show up on a page, and how noticeable it will be to the page visitors. It’s no longer enough to just tag text to influence the search engine, readability and visibility now has to actually be integrated into the web page design. Design in particular is something Google has become much more aware of by slowly understanding how people interpret design, rewarding sites with good design and punishing sites which are covered with ads.
Link building became online public relations
Despite being better at devaluing links from a useless website in 2010 Google would still rank your website well if you had a good network, and there was absolutely no penalizing involved yet.
Today Google algorithm updates like
Penguin made several sites go down while other websites are still trying to recover. It is no longer possible to buy links though the vast majority of bloggers know the value of a link and want to be paid for it.
The “secret” to this issue is to make sure that your relationships with bloggers and other websites are two
sided where they rely on you as much (if not more!) than you rely on them. Make yourself valuable to them by being a source of knowledge and relevant to their readers.
Anchor text manipulation is now branding
At the start of the decade the best way to get a high ranking for a keyword was to acquire a link with that keyword in the anchor text.
Now Google sees the need for linking to your brand name instead of having links focused on specific keywords. By linking to recognizable brands, people are more likely to click on the link as they feel more comfortable with brands. Google also figured that having a websites full of unbranded links probably meant that the links were paid for which lead to penalties.
What’s next?
The question everyone's asking now is if all this means that there’s no future in SEO. Well, no, not exactly. Even though we see in the above examples that Google has become much smarter when it comes to ranking, there’s still ways around it. What there’s no doubt about is that much more than in the past SEO alone can’t make your business into a success. Building an attractive and intuitive website that is relevant and content rich will reward you the best returns. Well run SEO is a part of successful online marketing, but it takes much more to succeed in the long run.
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