Way back before, having a website and knows a little bit about SEO are enough to guaranteed a website page to be in the first page of search engine result page, like Google and others. After that, websites become more specific on where they want to be on the first page of SERP, so they registered their website on local search engine, like Local Google and Local Yahoo. This practice is also enough to guarantee a website in medium-population city.
In the early SEO, most of the search engines forced website to put many keywords on their site or page, if they want to be in the first page of SERPs, but now this practice is classified as negative SEO and websites will get penalty if they keep doing this practice. But this practice was considered as a clever practice in SEO early days.
Time goes by, and more businesses implementing SEO practice for their websites making it hard for anyone to be in the first page of SERPs. With Google is still be the main target of search engine to conquer, many SEO webmasters paying attention to webmaster guidelines of Google and monitoring the latest update of algorithm changes that were announced. Besides reading guidelines from Google, SEO webmasters are also sharing their experiences, success and failure, of techniques that they used.
Even though, Google is giving the general ideas of the latest update of its algorithm but it never gave the specific explanations of their algorithms. Eventually, Google’s algorithms are getting more and more sophisticated, even it can eliminate websites that it considered doing “black hat” practices from SERPs. Surprisingly, the search engine also eliminating the usual standard practices like linking from and to random directories, putting many keywords in the content, keyword stuffing in the content and overusing keyword Meta tag are the targets of Google’s blacklist.
Google continued to expand it algorithms by launching many algorithms like Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird, and these algorithms changed on how website owners optimized their sites. Each updates could made some websites, disappear from first page because of penalties that they received. Right now, Google wants to see fast-opened websites, using up-to-date codes and correctly using keywords and the search engine are also punishing websites that refuse to follow on-page and technical rules.
With websites number getting bigger and bigger, including social media and mobile websites, changing online marketing practice. Google has updated its search criteria, fresh and valuable content are the ones that they looking for. It also wants content to have social signals that reader and viewers learning the value of the content. Mobile-friendly or responsive websites is another factor that it wants. Recently, Google has widened on what its indexing. Usually, search engine result page are mostly website pages that showing.
Now, when searching for specific term, blog posts, social media posts (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) and others could be seen on SERPs. With mobile internet searchers are getting more popular and have surpassed desktop searchers, affecting social media sites and apps could deliver search traffic to a website. If this trend keeps going then internet searchers may bypass Google and other search engines altogether. These and other updates will shift the dynamic, making it necessary for website owner or businesses that want to have their site on first page of SERPs to rebuild their online strategies to more advanced SEO practice.
