How SEO Has Changed in the Past 10 Years

The process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an ever-changing one. It began back in the mid-2000s and has been evolving ever since. In the very beginning, SEO was as simple as placing keywords wherever you could, spamming links and tweaking back-end code. Google has put a stop to those practices, however, and updated their algorithm tremendously.

So, how has SEO changed over the past 10 years?

1. The Rising of Content. The definition of ‘good content’ has changed over the past several years, but the Panda release in 2011 officially put a stop to spammy stuff. Instead of focusing on quantity, people focus more on quality. Content Marketing is now a popular SEO strategy, where people focus on providing the best and most quality content possible.
2. No More Link Schemes. Link schemes are anything that people do with links in order to deliberately influence ranking. Google began putting link schemes to death in the late 2000s, saying it was time for black hat SEO to be gone once and for all. That in combination with the Penguin release laid a foundation for link building and all it has become today.
3. Local SEO. Local SEO has been completely reshaped from what it used to consist of. The most important updates have been the 3-pack layout, Carousel, and the Pigeon update. The Pigeon update has successfully allowed brands with well-optimized websites to have a major advantage in local search. Because of mobile-devices, local searches have become much more common.
4. SERP Overhauls. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) have undergone many transformations, tweaking the way results appear, paid ads, and so forth.
5. Mobile Prioritization. Since the introduction of iPhones in 2007, mobile search has absolutely exploded. Brands understand the necessity of being relevant to mobile searches, and having their websites as optimized as possible for this process of searching. In 2015, mobile searches officially passed desktop searches in Google search.
6. Soft Death of Keyword Optimization. In 2013, an update called Hummingbird introduced semantic search after Penguin and Panda both killed off keyword stuffing. Semantic search is Google’s way of figuring out what user’s content meaning is, rather than mapping out specific phrases and keywords.

Overall, it is important to recognize that where SEO came from, the updates that have been made since, and where it is headed will help you be the best possible online marketer. Make sure your strategy is up to date, and all black hat techniques are eliminated.