Has SEO had its day?

Getting your website onto the first page of Google’s listings has huge benefits for your business, in terms of lead generation and sales. SEO has long been the tool to get you there, but has it had its day?

Over the past few years there have been many drastic changes with regard to Search Engine Optimisation and the techniques hidden within.  In fact SEO is constantly adjusting and remodelling itself in order to keep up with an ever-changing online market, and is directly affected by the improving algorithms of major search engines like Google.  It is therefore imperative for businesses to keep up to date with SEO, as failing to do so could lead to significant drops in website views and publicity, and a reduction, therefore, in lead generation and sales.

Previously, SEO has relied on old-fashioned procedures such as keyword stuffing and link exchanges, and these methods were very successful.  Websites were able to cheat their way to the top and this resulted in an over-population of poor quality sites, as people were literally cramming unrelated, popular words and links onto their pages in order to achieve top rankings in search engines.  Over time the search engines caught up with these deceitful methods, thanks to their algorithms becoming more sophisticated and advanced, and they now view such approaches as spam or “black-hat”, and websites using these approaches are heavily penalised.

Recently, a lot the SEO work we do involves undoing the damages already laid in place by other SEO companies that used the cheating methods.  Websites must now rely on quality content for success in search engine results, and this is the direction that we take our clients on.

So what is important?  Information needs to be high quality, useful and authoritative, and any off-site links that are formed must be relevant to that page and appropriate to the covered topic.  The digital market has become massive for business revenue, making SEO one of the most important tools a company can have these days. Content marketing is now at an all time industry high and is an important element of the new SEO role.  Social networking sites have become the norm with existence on these sites being paramount for businesses worldwide. This is another crucial factor in the current SEO market as it is not just the existence of a company that bears importance on social networking sites, it is also the quality of that existence such as, how you look and what it is your saying.  I will be covering these topics in more detail in future blogs.

So, in conclusion: Has SEO had its day? … Well if we are talking about what we used to know as SEO then I would have to say most definitely.  It is an obsolete practice that will cause your business more harm than anything else.  However, if we are talking about SEO in its new form, with focus on strong content and a great user experience, supported by content and digital marketing then I would have to say that it is more relevant now than ever!