Anyone who has created a website or started a business has heard of the term “SEO.” This stands for search engine optimization and refers to how website owners make their sites more search engine friendly. However, just as marketing itself has changed over the years, so has SEO.
SEO Is Not Dead, It Has Changed
Many people believe that SEO is dead, but as long as they continue to use search engines, such as Google and Bing, SEO will never truly go away. That being said, the way we go about using digital marketing has changed.
SEO and search engine marketing as a whole changed after search engines realized that search rankings were not based on the most accurate information. For example, Google used to place a lot of stock in how many links for a website were on other sites. The idea being that a website must have valuable content if other sites are linking to it. This led many websites to focus on buying links on other websites instead of focusing on true web marketing.
Another SEO ranking tactic that has all but been done away with is keywords. Search engines still use keywords to search sites, but keywords hold very little weight on the ranking of websites. Once again, search engines had to move away from ranking sites this way because of keyword stuffing. Instead of providing people with quality content, website owners were just filling their sites with the most searched for keywords.
The New Face of Web Marketing
Just because SEO marketing has changed doesn’t mean that it has gone away. Rather, search engines have changed the way they rank sites. An example of this is social media marketing. Twitter and Facebook, for instance, have changed the way that companies advertise and the way consumers search for information.
The social media phenomenon is too big of a force to be ignored. Instead of pretending that it’s not there, Google and other search engines decided to use social media sites in their rankings. For example, the followers that a website has on its social media page can impact its page ranking. This is because it’s harder to fake social media followers. Google has also come up with ways to prevent fake profiles or dummy profiles from ranking positively on websites. The rankings improve for websites that have very active social media followers.
In short, websites are better off investing in real content and offering promotions via social media than keyword stuffing articles that add little to no value to their pages. SEO marketing has a new face, and it rewards websites and companies that strive to offer quality services.