A Brief History of SEO How it Has Evolved Over The Years
Technical Search engine optimization is what we have been using for the past decade, and only the skills have changed but the techniques are still the same. The search engine has always liked quality content and organic means of SEO, but today the means of attaining these objects have modified. All the websites were crawled even then as they are now but today search engines check the authenticity of the content whereas “one-word keywords” are given almost no importance. According to the years:
• The early to Mid 2000s
Search engines became a part of Web and developers started working on developing better websites, which could be indexed and crawled without any extra efforts. Also, during that time the black hat tactics took over technical SEO techniques which included keywords stuffing, buying of links that drove SEO performance, etc. At that time Google’s algorithms couldn’t keep up because they weren’t strong enough to find the techniques that were used for manipulation.
But when Google finally caught up, and the techniques became ineffective, SEO went mainstream, and marketers and optimizers began searching for new strategies.
• The early to Mid 2010s
Search engines required new algorithms because of the content being too thin, misleading, and un-authentic. Google kind of clamped down because of the low-quality backlinks which resulted in a wide range of penalties. Later the content and SEO begin to evolve with the release of better algorithms that took down a lot of sites and change the course of SEO. It not only took down sites with bad quality content but also gave a chance to the new businesses to rise in the market and prepare for competition.
Meanwhile, the sites that encountered such de-ranking problems couldn’t recover for almost two years. I must say that was one hell of a penalty and people gave up on ranking those sites because they thought they could come out of those penalties by just changing their content.
• From 2015 Till Today
Many ideas were introduced in the market, and a lot evolved especially the content discovery when people began writing material for the people not for the search engines. The reason was the relevancy of the queries; people couldn’t find what they were exactly looking for because search engines just focused on finding the matching keywords in other sites content. Today, search engines work with relevancy; they don’t just match the keywords but look for material that is relevant to the search query and this content discovery update, made a lot of sites change their material.
Today, Mobile usage has surpassed desktop and Voice search has become a part of every search engine including other websites. People today are opting to go for optimization for voice-related queries; the reason is the significant increase in the percentage of people making vocal queries. Search today is on every new technology, and the internet market is full of competition.
The only thing today changed is how we applied those techniques. Today with different algorithms being introduced the internet is becoming a safe place for visitors, surfers, explorers and everyone else. SEO will keep improving because search engines are working on memorizing the queries to provide better results whenever a relevant search is done. Also, today there are three keys to a better performance of the website: the Site Content, the structure, and the addition of right keywords.
You can read about voice search like Amazon’s Alexa Is Not Just An AI — Humans Are Listening To You Too