While the universe of SEO is an ever-evolving world, there are fundamental things that remain relevant. But wise SEO experts know how significant it is, now more than ever, to follow the direction of the tide—and keep on learning the course of the SEO business . As Cariene So, an executive in an SEO agency in Singapore would say,
“ We could not stop for what seems to be elusively changing, but we could always hold on to the rudimentary and the core of the SEO business.”
It seems like every year, search engine optimization follows a new track, speeds on to reach a certain direction, and if you are slow to pick up, your techniques will be passé in no time. As a thriving SEO company in countries like the US, Singapore, Philippines, among others, you should learn to hold on to the SEO fundamentals—but still have some room to embrace what is inevitably changing. As a good SEO philosophy to keep, blending the old and the new is a way to bring a brighter future.
Neil Patel, a New York Times best selling author writes
“…targeting keywords with the sole intent of improving organic rankings no longer works, but keywords are still essential… With so many SEO techniques, it’s become almost impossible to determine which ones to stick to and which you can safely ignore.”
And true enough, SEO keeps on surprising practitioners in its encompassing ways to keep businesses in their desired ranks. And this SEO evolution is brought by a myriad of changes that is happening too on other online platforms.
One of the things that changed over the years is how important it is to weed out anything that slows down your website. As Neil Patel observed “Page speed is a critical factor in SEO”. If in the past, no one minds if it takes you 10 minutes to read the full content of an internal page, today, speed can make or break your business. “In the mind of potential buyers, a slow site is an untrustworthy site,” as Patel further shared in his article on ‘Top 10 Most Important SEO Tips You Need To Know’. And we could not agree more. If the website is taking forever to load, the person browsing is likely to move on to another site with a faster loading speed.
Another SEO evolution observer, Winston Burton writes “When performing on-page optimization in the old days, SEOs would map two to five keywords per URL and optimize the page elements (title, meta description, headings, body content and so on) for these keywords. But things have changed. Now, with advances in semantic search and machine learning, a page can rank for a lot of related keywords, not just the keywords for which you optimize the page. This is a better way of doing things, as having content that fulfills the needs of what users are looking for (rather than just being the best match for a given keyword string) is a better experience.”
This brings us to the understanding that merely creating content is not enough in the present times—the more challenging job now is more on content promotion rather that content creation.
And this is why modern SEO also seems to be more mindful now of the kind devices that consumers use to view website contents. Back in the day, people only uses desktops for internet search, but as more and more gadgets that can access the internet were created (more advanced and internet capable cellphones, iPad, iPhones, among others), SEO professionals had to adjust their work too. Mobile devices are now suddenly preferred by internet users. In fact, a study of comScore showed that about 65% of digital media time is now made possible by mobile usage. And this is the reason why SEOs are extra mindful to build sites that are mobile-friendly per se so site speed will not be a hindrance.
Moreover, SEO has also been affected by netizens’ sudden dependency of social media like Facebook, twitter, instagram and the like. Pre-social media era, people online exchange information and messaging through their e-mails or instant messaging—which are outside the realm of SEO campaigns. But that changed the game drastically as people made logging in to their social media accounts part of their daily habit—a lifestyle and a religion if we may say—that affected the SEO world too. Today, SEO can depend on social media, as if it is its right arm, for brand exposure of a business to a wide and diverse market that are all to be found in a virtual space. A wise SEO can fully utilize social networks to gain shares and links to its advantage.
*BONUS TIDBITS*
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True enough, SEO has come a long way—and it seems like the evolution doesn’t stop here, as long as the internet game keeps on evolving too.