Best best company will here hear the phrase 'search
engine optimisation' (or SEO) from friends in the business community or even
competitors and may consider it as a route to increasing sales, but what is
SEO? Alternatively, a business owner may have tried 'SEO services' in the past
and found it either didn't work as well as expected or was working, but no
longer as effective - this article explains what
SEO is, and why 'new' SEO is working better than ever.
I have been working in search engine optimisation and
ranking website market, before it was even called SEO. Here are the changes in
SEO since the start of the new millennium and what you should be looking for in
the SEO services that your SEO Agency offers or provides.
We take a look back at SEO through the years and explain
what SEO is today and how best to utilise it for our website.
SEO in 2000
Back at the start of the Millennium the 'big' search engines
that most people were using were Lycos and Excite. Of course, back then a very
small percentage of the UK population had access to the internet and those that
did had a slow 'dial-up' system.
Websites were one or two pages with basic information to
allow them to load quickly (within 20 seconds). SEO practices back then were to
'hide' as many keywords on a page as possible, so the website was found for
those searches without making the page look to spammy for visitors.
In 2002 Google launched something called 'AdWords' and it
was predicted to be the death of SEO, as people could pay for prominence, on
the now the number 1 website for starting internet searches.
In 2003, Yahoo purchased Inktomi, AltaVista and FAST, which
was basically the end of all of the 'smaller' search engines. Google started to
stamp down on 'spam' practices and websites. At the same time Google realised
that 'AdWords' were not going to kill off SEO and that in fact the 'natural
listings' encouraged visitors back to their search engine platform. Google
started to recognise 'professional SEO' experts and promoted good SEO rather
than spamming SEO.
2004 saw the first website 'banned' from the internet as
Google took action against websites that were spamming them. They also took
legal action against the "SEO Company" responsible.
To rank a website in 2006 you just needed links back to your
website and so buying links / link exchange was all the rage and most websites
had a web page where they would list companies and links to their website (I am
still amazed how many websites continue this practice).
Between 2004 and 2008 Google, now was the only real
"player" in the search engine world, started taking action against
poor linking practices and companies and started tightening up on spam and
buying links. The 'Noughties" ended with all "naughty" SEO
practices being practically stamped out, as Google concentrated on ranking
websites based on their content and it's relevance to the search being carried
out.
Between 2010 and 2015 we started to see the search engines
take notice of 'Social Media' sites and soon the results were filled with
Twitter 'tweets' in the results. (I can still see the face of one of my
customers when searching Google for his business, and the whole first page of
the search results were compiled of tweets of a Twitter conversation that two
members of staff had been having about how terrible the company was!)
Videos and images were also brought in to the search results
with the Google 'Caffeine' update.
Google introduced "personal search results" with
the websites shown in the search results based on your previous searches and
websites you had visited before. This caused a 'bit of a stir' in the SEO world
as customers claimed their websites were "top of Google" for any
search they did related to their industry, just because they had visited their
own website many times before, so Google of course fed them back the website
for all relevant searches. This can still be a bit of an issue until you show
them the new 'Google Incognito search'.
The focus on ranking websites was on being found for BIG
keywords. A 'Plumber' in Bristol would want to rank for that search, and so
that was the focus.
Google 'Panda' and 'Penguin' updates figuratively killed off
'link exchanges' with huge penalties for websites who had irrelevant links
pointing towards them. At the same time Google introduced "no follow
links" to allow websites to provide relevant links to other websites and
information without penalising either party. It was the start of "safe
linking". Quality and relevant content was now the key to ranking in the
search engines.
A report by the 'Office For National Statistics' in 2014
stated:
38 million adults (76%) in Great Britain accessed the
Internet every day, 21 million more than in 2006, when directly comparable
records began.
Access to the Internet using a mobile phone more than
doubled between 2010 and 2014, from 24% to 58%.
74% of all adults bought goods or services online, up from
53% in 2008. Clothes (49%) were the most popular online purchase in 2014.
Of all adults in Great Britain, 67% are aware of Internet
storage space services, but the take up of these services to store data is much
lower at 35%.
In Great Britain, 22 million households (84%) had Internet
access in 2014, up from 57% in 2006.
Fixed broadband Internet connections were used by 91% of
households.
The UK was now (almost) internet savvy and usage of mobile
phones to visit websites was huge.
SEO 2015 and Onwards
The biggest change to the search engines in 2015 was the
'penalisation' of websites that were not "mobile friendly" - a mobile
friendly website has different information for the smaller screen to make it
easier for the user to read and understand. In ensuring that users got the best
experience Google started ranking mobile friendly or responsive websites (where
the website automatically changes its size and format to fit the screen) higher
in the rankings.
The UK population were using their mobile phones for local
searches, and local companies could at last gain an advantage over the large
corporates or 'national' companies on the internet.
The introduction of 'semantic search', where Google brings
back websites in the results not based on the keywords, but the content on a
page, again changed the way SEO agencies looked at working on websites. Ranking
for the 'Big' keywords, such as 'Plumber Bristol' became less important, as
internet users became more savvy with their searches. 'Long tail keywords', and
as many as possible, started to grow website visitors and more importantly,
conversions.
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