Every Search Consultant will tell you SEO changes, every day. Every day google updates something in it’s algorithm, every day something will alter on the web at large the makes SEO change, and sometimes big things happen that alter things Hugely … hell I don’t think there are many initial SEO consultations I report to that don’t include the words “SEO has changed since this website was built”.
But fundamentally SEO Never changes…
It sounds bananas that anyone would say such a thing, let alone someone with years of experience such as myself. But it’s true and here’s why.
The fundamentals of SEO, the basic building blocks of GREAT Search Engine Optimisation don’t change. They never have. What was white hat when I started years ago, is still white hat today. What was black hat then is still black hat. And if it was gray hat or unsure, and you probably shouldn’t have touched it, well it’s either still that or black hat and you were a donkey for doing it (end of!).
So what are those core building blocks of SEO?
- Crawlability
Can search engines read and see ALL the content on the website easily, follow links within the site, is the code clean behind the website and is the site structure easy to navigate. - Great Content
Ensuring the content on the website, and that which you produce for social media and any third party locations is the best possible (and audience specific). In addition to this ensuring that it is all keyphrase/keyword focused and all content is naturally written to answer the topic of a given page. - Keywords / Keyphrases
Target a single keyword/keyphrase per page, ensuring it is one which your target audience will use and search for. It is a good idea to use some demographic research and test your keywords using social media for clicks / return before using them on your website where testing (if a small website audience) can take longer. You should use two categories of keywords, primary (overall keywords – such as SEO Consultant in Manchester or Digital Marketing Consultant in London) and secondary (such as seo for mobile websites and SEO for social enterprises). - Good Quality Backlinks
Building good quality backlinks from established and/or authority websites in your marketing / industry helps your website to build authority and will establish credibility with both search engines and web users. Building bad links, no matter how many, will only reflect badly and may result in detrimental results such as penalisation from search engines.
SEO Never Changes, SEO is Trust
The reason SEO Never Changes is simply because SEO is all about trust and nothing else. If you build a website with great content that is trusted by your peers and proven to be so, you will rank.
It’s not exactly a mythical creature, despite what many will have you believe.
It is sometimes fantastically hard work. There are billions of websites after all, and sometimes billions in a single niche, but always millions no matter how small you think the niche market you’ve decided on. So getting that illusive number one spot for multiple keywords won’t be easy. But if you can get up those rankings and get that traffic it will be worth it.