SEO once and today. How has SEO evolved?
In recent years, a real Internet revolution has taken place before our eyes. At the beginning of the 21st century, few of us had the Internet in our own homes. Nowadays, we cannot imagine functioning without it - we have access to it via computers, tablets or phones. You could say that we are online almost twenty-four hours a day. The universality of the Internet and such wide access to it has meant that no entrepreneur can afford not to have their company online. Just being present is not enough, you still need to be able to reach a wide audience of potential customers. How to do this? This is where positioning plays a major role. How has it changed over the years? What mechanisms used to work in the past, and what do you need to do now in order for your website to rank highly in a search engine? In this article, we present the history of positioning, which hides a lot of interesting information.
The rapid IT development has significantly influenced the way SEO is done. Changing criteria have led to more and more entrepreneurs hiring professional companies with positioning experts and SEO copywriters. They optimise websites and create valuable content for the pages that have an impact on domain positioning. If we want to have a thriving business and a lot of customers, it is definitely worth opting for this kind of step, which will bring a lot more traffic to our website.
The history of SEO. What was it like in the beginning?
SEO is inextricably linked to keywords. In the early days, however, the keyword content posted did not have to make much sense in terms of content. It was enough for keywords to appear in meaningless articles or descriptions. You could simply add them wherever you could and not worry about whether it was valuable. What's more, phrases could not be conjugated, because Google did not recognise them at the time. Posting unique content was not common either. The mechanisms at the time were such that the same content could be duplicated many times over, copied from other sites, and the goal of achieving a high search engine ranking was achieved. Today, such practices are unacceptable. It may also be interesting to note what the so-called external linking, which plays a rather important role in SEO, looked like. What it boiled down to was that you had to paste links to your site in as many places as possible. As a result, comments and forums were full of links that had nothing to do with the discussions taking place there... This is the history of SEO. Nowadays, in order to get to the top, you have to try much harder.
SEO in the past and today
It used to be that SEO was based on actions that, above all, had to be recognisable by Google's robots. What mattered was not quality, but quantity - keywords, phrases, external links, etc. And in this respect, positioning used to be and is today hugely different. The requirement now is that the content posted should not only be readable by robots, but also useful to humans. The big change in this respect came in 2011, when Google decided to introduce the Panda algorithm. At that time, websites were put under the microscope and penalties began to be imposed on owners who copied content, made clusters of keywords, accumulated them in texts without much order and had so-called aggressive, intrusive advertisements. Attention also began to be paid to ensuring that the site had correct and valuable content - both graphically and in terms of content. From this point on, only unique texts that are substantive count in SEO. Google's algorithms have changed a great deal over the past several years. What then is the situation with link building, i.e. links to web addresses on other websites? Here, too, it is quality that matters, not quantity as in the past. Google's algorithms are capable of catching links that are added in excessive numbers automatically (e.g. 100 per day), treating them as spam and zeroing them out. So, modern SEO is the responsibility of much smarter robots than previous versions.
SEO today
In order for a website to rank highly, you need up-to-date SEO knowledge and the skills to implement the right actions. It is certainly necessary to know which Google algorithms are key and which mistakes should not be made. It is also important to check which keywords are most frequently searched for, who is visiting your site and to take all this into account when planning your online marketing. SEO today places numerous demands on website owners.