Common Website Mistakes 9: SEO Over Everything
The History of Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is as old as search engines, although the term had not been coined back then. The rise of Google - and fall of the other search engines - made it worthwhile to invest in improving your search ranking because you could solely focus on a single algorithm. This lead to the rise of "Blackhat SEO", which is a technique of making content appearing more relevant than it actually is. A most infamous example from the past is including invisible content with lots of keywords to counterfeit the relevance of the actual content and appear more important to the search engine.
The Empire Strikes Back
Most people seem to think that the Google scoring algorithm is static and does not change much, but nothing could be further from the truth. In the early days, many of these changes were countermeasures to prevent fraudulent boosting of search results, trying to prevent Blackhat SEO. Websites came up with new ways of deceiving Google and Google in terms would continuously update their algorithm to fight back.
SEO Today
Today Google tries to mimic a real visitor as much as possible, ignoring invisible content, spotting informational overload and assessing information structure and presentation. The fight to exploit search engine flaws found an equilibrium, where it should take less effort to produce genuinely good content than artificially boost bad content. Google gives you a lot of tips of how to structure and present your content in a way that makes it easier to understand for itself and more appealing to your visitors simultaneously.
What can you do?
I am not saying SEO is useless and should be ignored. But before investing a ton of money into making your content appearing more relevant, think about investing it into genuinely improving your content. I understand the temptation of having a holy grail solution that magically improves your search ranking forever, but there is no simple solution to this. The highest benefit comes from sticking to some basic rules, like having proper metadata such as title, description, keywords and image alt texts, as well as following some web best practices. If you are using a content management system, there is a good chance that there are already tools in place to take care of these issues. You can use tools like Google Lighthouse and the Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) to verify best practices and debug issues with your site, but the best way of improving your search ranking is having high quality content. SEO is for now, great content is forever!
What do you think?
Do you agree? Did you experience situations where printing culture slowed down your publication process? Is this article helpful and would you enjoy similar content? Let me know in the comments.
Aknowledgements
Photo by Matt Howard on Unsplash