2015 was a significant year for online businesses, witnessing some major upgrades in the field of digital marketing. Search engine optimization has become quite a familiar term now. More and more individuals and businesses are delving into the online space by hosting multiple sites to promote their products and services globally. Moreover, in order to increase their online visibility, internet marketers have started to make optimal usage of all the internet promotional techniques, including the holistic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Optimization (SMO).
This blog will focus on imparting a detailed study of how SEO has changed with time and what might be the result-driven trends in the near future.
Do you know how SEO originated?
During the early 1990s, some companies began experimenting with the theory of search engine optimization. At that time, the main emphasis was on the submission part. By 1995, the first automated data submission software package was developed and released online. As things got commercial, it didn’t take much time for SPAMMERS to show their presence in the online world. Some of the webmasters figured out the way to manipulate the search engine results by over-submitting their sites. Yet, it was inevitable for the search engines to patch things up and fight back against the black hat webmasters from doing further spamming.
This started to turn out as a hide-and-seek game between the webmasters and the search engines. Every time these webmasters tried to manipulate the search results, the search engines came up with algorithmic shifts as a defensive move towards the unethical tactics followed by the search engine optimizers.
All of this happened in the absence of Google.
By the time Google.com stepped in and became the most preferred search engine for more than 50% of the worldwide internet users, spamming had reached a new dimension altogether. Since Google search was very refined and added on to the success factor of a website, webmasters solely started to concentrate on SEO with respect to Google. In fact, the payoff was worth the effort involved in optimizing Google search results. Hence, as a result, black hat SEO also started to show up, and Google had to stipulate the way things were heading so far.
So Google came up with Sandbox. In layman’s terms, Sandbox resembled a sort of parking area, wherein Google would park the websites that were categorized as SPAM or didn’t comply with the terms and conditions set by Google. Eventually, with Google rising to fame, they started off with their own algorithmic updates—the Google Zoo—which in turn affected the website rankings.
Apparently, this is how search engine optimization emerged as a part of the digital marketing bracket.
What is SEO in 2016?
In the current digital marketing scenario, SEO plays an important role. A lot of websites
rely on SEO to seek better search engine rankings. The logic behind better rankings is quite clear—the better your website ranks, the more visible it is on the internet. Henceforth, this further implies a better CTR (click-through rate) ratio, which further helps in conversions.
With Google’s latest Panda update, things are getting strict when it comes to SEO. The web is already flooded with millions of websites, yet the information provided by most of the websites appears to be redundant. So Google is trying to filter the data and rank those websites that intend to impart valuable data, presented in a much more user-engaging manner. In fact, with the latest mobile responsive update, Google is quite clear with its intention to support the websites that are mobile responsive. So sites that are mobile responsive tend to rank better on the Google SERP. All of this effort is to simply make use of the web traffic from the mobile devices as well. And since as of late, the internet is being used a lot on mobile devices, this move by Google seems to be impactful.
In this over-crowded worldwide web, what can be an ideal ranking factor? Well, Google has been trying to define some quality parameters with its regular search engine algorithm updates (Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, and Pigeon), and this has resulted in a change in the default approach of webmasters towards applying the search engine optimization techniques.
Here are some of the key white hat SEO techniques as of 2015, which can help a website become more visible on the internet.
1) Focus on the quality of content your website publishes.
Here is the thing: good content is one of the keys to a website's success. If the content on your website is relevant to your target audience, Google will index your site, rank it well, and present it ardently to the kind of users for whom your information might be valuable. This way, your website’s visibility increases over the search engine result pages, and you get more web traffic.
It is recommended that you start focusing on how to create the content for your website. Be innovative and unique. Link your content with relevant sites that add to the user's reading experience while browsing through your content. Do not simply present data in a textual manner; rather, try to fuse in elements such as infographics, slide decks, and graphics.
Do remember, a picture speaks a thousand words. So you can always capitalize on that.
2) Guest posting is always effective, provided your approach is genuine.
Some time back, Google started penalizing websites that supported guest posting. This happened because of the fact that people started posting redundant, spun content that did not impart valuable data. In fact, people targeted guest posting simply to build links back to their websites, which appeared as an unethical spamming technique.
Ever since Google started penalizing websites trying to do such stuff, the approach towards guest posting has changed. Now, in order to get published on good websites, it takes a lot of time, effort, and research to build up a relationship with these well-reputed websites and present them with content that is valuable, unique, informative, and meaty.
3) Adequate social sharing and social media campaigns are always fruitful from an SEO perspective.
When you know that your content is valuable to the target audience, it’s necessary to move ahead with the process of quality social sharing on various social media platforms. Nowadays, Twitter and Facebook aren’t the only social media platforms for heavy social sharing. In fact, platforms such as LinkedIn, Slideshare, Pinterest, Tumblr, and even Instagram have become tools for social sharing.
The use of hashtags (#) and the use of social media campaigns are always success-oriented moves towards generating web traffic and then redirecting it to your website.
All you need is a strategic and innovative user-engaging plan of action, and the rest will happen by itself.
The Internet has now become an indispensable part of businesses and individuals. So it's inevitable to witness innovative modifications to the same in the near future, especially while considering the bigger picture. Technology is going internet savvy, and so is the human lifestyle along with it. And as our dependency on the internet grows, the internet gets redefined time and again. Likewise, SEO has been through a ride in this time-changing internet world, and perhaps there might be a lot of upgrades in the coming years.
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