The evolution of SEO – How SEO has evolved over the years

search engine optimizationSEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing your website for search engines, so you can get traffic by free, natural, organic and editorial search results from different search engines. All search engines rank web pages and other content such as local listings and videos on the basis of what will be most relevant to the user’s search.

They then display website pages which are more relevant and authoritative towards the top of the results, with the relevance being decided by analyzing page content in relation to the users’ search query. Search engines also analyze and assess authority on the basis of quality and the number of quality links that a page has.

How has SEO has evolved over the years?

The SEO industry has evolved immensely over the past few years. A few years ago, SEO was very different to how we see it today. In the mid-90s and mid-20s there were no web analytics available for websites unless you had a major website and a big budget. There were not that many good options, and the few good options that were available were not cheap!

seoIn 2006, SEO started to become a profitable business when little or almost no analytical data was available, and SEOs wanted to find a metric which they could track and which they could easily influence without analytics. During this time, search engines used the same format to rank websites, and because of that the result is almost the same. It was easy to track where a site ranks and then to relate the data of a ranked site with traffic, transformation and other data was being measured. Due to the consistency of SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), there was no clear relation between the rankings.

Then there was a time when search engines used rank tracking. Now search engine results have changed and that’s why search engines no longer use rank tracking.

Google has around 85 different SERP features, and 85% of all searches usually show one or more of these features. These features work so efficiently, and due to the effect they have on CTR’s (Click-Through Rates), the #1 organic ranking position appears right below the fold of the pages and also reduces your CTR for that position.

As years go by, SEO is becoming more efficient and SEO’s are continually looking for new metrics for rank tracking.

Some of the metrics through which Google analyzes the data on internet are given below:

  • Organic Volume Traffic

  • Keywords which drive organic traffic

  • Percentage of organic traffic (non-branded) keywords compared with branded keywords

  • Highest transforming organic keywords

  • Ranking for top keywords

  • Domain authority or Google page rank

  • Quantity, Quality, Relevancy and Diversity of External Links

  • Quantity, Quality, Relevancy and Diversity of Linking root domains

  • Cost of per conversion from organic visit

The above mentioned list was once perfectly accurate, but since search behavior is constantly changing, so is this list.

Today, search engines use keywords. If you want a good rank for your page, you have to choose good keywords and keywordsmention them naturally within your page content. Try to spend time brainstorming and researching keywords using tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner. The other thing that is important for SEO today is page authority. We should move our focus to get traffic from keywords to getting traffic to pages. Driving traffic to a good quality content is easy irrespective to how keywords are targeted. SEO’s also consider brand power to increase traffic. Use link-building efforts through guest blogging or by sharing your content to make your brand stand out. In addition to these points, your website should be well-designed, and should load quickly, since page load speed is another of Google’s ranking factors.

Conclusion

So to conclude, over the last few years, SEO’s have had to adapt quickly to the regular changes in the industry, which are still progressing. From the above article we come to know how SEO was then and how they are now. They have changed greatly as compared to the past years. The SEO’s are now ranking the web content more efficiently and has evolved so much over the years.

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