What Role Do SEO Techniques Play?
In short, a massive role! SEO ranking techniques have changed massively over the past 10 years, so much so, that if you are not aware of the changes or keep up with how Google ranks websites, what it looks out for then your website simply will not rank on page 1 if you deploy tactics that worked 5 years ago or even 12 months ago. There is only one thing to be aware of with SEO is that the way we rank websites are always changing!
On-Page Techniques, How They’ve Changed
Primitive search engine algorithms created Google and other search engines used to simply look at the content on a website page and see if there was a phrase that was repeated over and over again. Say for instance, so you had a page about ‘car insurance’ and you have that phrase listed over and over on the page, the search engines would believe that your page was an important page about ‘Car insurance’ and they would rank you highly accordingly.
Overtime, webmasters realised this and went into overkill with keyword stuffing for phrases they wanted to rank for in Google. The problem with having pages built this way was that they read very badly and made no real sense at all! The main search engine, Google realised this and reduced it’s keyword density dramatically, to such as extent that it now became impossible to rank a web page that has had keyword stuffing incorporated into its page. The extent to which keyword phrase can be written on a page has been reduced to levels that now make the page readable and you can clearly see if a page has been over-optimised now.
Gradually, other components of website on-page tactics have influenced the ranking factors of Google’s algorithm, such as; structured data markup, punctuation, site speed, time on the website, unique content and grammar and spelling used.
Off-Page Techniques – How Google Won The Search Engine Race
Search Engine results were a bit ‘hit and miss’ with what was returned when a user typed in what they were searching for. That was until Google came along, they devised an algorithm that used ‘links’ to a website as a voting system for determining how relevant and how much other people liked websites. On the premise of ‘if people like something they will naturally link to a particular website or article’ they developed a search engine that provided the best results and more and more people started to use Google as the main search engine for what they are searching for.
SEO consultants noticed that and quickly developed an SEO link building technique that would help their websites rank a lot higher - creating software that would send thousands of links with the exact match anchor text to a website. This, in turn, would then drive up the ranking positions of the websites, which gave them more traffic. Spamming websites worked, and SEO consultants profited from it.
As with any arms race, Google and the other search engines noticed this and they changed their algorithm with an update called ‘Penguin’. This literally killed off thousands of spammed websites overnight and since then the Penguin algorithm has changed to incorporate smaller percentages of targeted anchor phrases in the anchor text each time. The percentage now has dropped to below 15% and most small websites that rank well are ranking well because of a lot fewer links placed strategically.
As with a Grand Master chess player, their techniques, get better over time as they play the game more and more. In the same way, the algorithm that Google uses to for their rankings has gradually been refined over and over so that it is more and more difficult to notice its changes eventually.
If you use our services then you will find that we use the latest and most up to date methods for both on-page SEO and off-page SEO. To return to the main SEO Essex Consulting page to go back to home.
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