With the birth of the Internet came the birth of SEO
In the early years of these algorithms, keywords were…well…key. The more keywords a website had, the higher up it would appear in the list of relevant sites. On the surface this appears to be reasonable. But, website designers soon found a way to trick the system. They’d load pages into a site with nothing but keywords. These pages had no information, just repeated keywords. This little cheat frustrated consumers, because it frequently meant the best sites fell lower in the list. So the search engine developers began to tweak the algorithms and make them more complex. But clever website designers continued to find ways around the system. For a while, content was king. It didn’t have to be good content, just new articles loosely related to the subject of the website. This led to content mills and article spinning (rewriting the same information over and over again just enough so it qualified as new). There were also requirements of links to and from relative sites, number of hits, then number of unique hits, and hundreds of other little pieces to the algorithms.
|Search algorithms are constantly evolving|
Google’s Panda Update
- Write from your passion. Passion is obvious in good writing. Don’t follow the trends, follow your heart when you’re finding a focus for your blog or website.
- Generate good, valuable content. This means correct grammar, as well as tightly focused relevant articles.
- Come up with targeted titles. Don’t throw out the keywords completely. But use them to reflect the actual message of your post. Not sure how to use keywords correctly? Here’s a post I wrote on Using Keywords Effectively.
- Format your site and your content with the READER in mind. This means an easy-to-read font, block formatting, and short—targeted—articles.
- Keep a regular schedule. This is so critically important. Everyone who creates a blog wants his readers to return. But how can we expect that, when we’re never home. Meaning, we post sporadically and without apparent rhyme or reason. All that does is frustrate our readers and prove we’re not trustworthy. There is WAY too much competition for us to be lazy.
|SEO isn’t dead, just different|