SEO is a whole new game
It used to be that the average person thought of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a series of tricks that a professional expert used to trick Google into ranking their site above a competitors'.
And for the most part, that was true. There's the old definition of a SEO being either black hat, someone employing cheap nasty tricks that got huge results for the short term, and white hat, someone focusing on quality content and link building which takes longer but gets long-term results.
In 2011 Google made black hats pretty well redundant for good, and even some strategies that the quality SEO's utilized has become less relevant. Google has updated their search algorithms with something called "Panda" which takes into account ratings from real human beings visiting a website. More than ever, this means that Google's criteria for ranking a website is based off of the following:
- How trustworthy does the site feel?
- How easy is it to use and navigate?
- How engaging is the content?
What has become much less important are things like meta tags, headings and other technical tricks that were meant to assist Google's bots in indexing and caching the website.
The other big thing that affects SEO is social media. In the past, the amount of links to a website from a social network like Twitter or Facebook was not counted vary highly. However now social engagement is one of the most effective ways of showing Google that real humans care about a website.
So instead of a SEO strategy consisting of planning what keywords appear in title and meta tags, headings and anchor tags, it has become more imperative that the plan focuses on compelling, unique content, a well-designed interface and letting people know about it through a variety of social channels.
This is a change for the better, and will hopefully result in a better internet, where the #1 result for a keyword will be based off of the things we humans care about.
on July 06th, 2012, Sarah said...
Hey Kyle,
Thanks for posting - SEO is certainly a different animal and will continue to evolve. Social media does play a part in SEO ranking however it depends on the nature of the website’s content. Many business websites are NOT going to go viral on FB yet benefit big time from SEO (like insolvency or debt relief or private lending - for example). We find many digital marketing companies are pushing clients in the social media direction when it simply doesn’t make sense for their business. Jen and I (being SEO consultants since 1996) thought you could add information to this post about a very important update to the Google algorythm called ‘Penguin’ (24.04.2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin - which would make this information more current
Thanks for blogging and giving us something to respond to - we admittedly - don’t blog enough
Best regards,
The girls @ Net Impact
on July 06th, 2012, Kyle Racki said...
Thanks for the info Sarah, I hadn’t heard of Penguin before, so that’s helpful.
I agree, social media is not a catch-all strategy and many businesses have no need for it. Any other light you can shed would be appreciated.