7 Reasons Why SEO For Your Website Is Still Important
Regardless of how things change over time, SEO for your website is still important. SEO (search engine optimization) helps you to add value to your audience, attract a more targeted audience and get more traffic. SEO isn’t dead, and likely never will be dead.
Marketers are always going to be figuring out ways to work within the rules that Google and other search engines set to accomplish their goal, which is to get their information and solutions to their targeted audience.
What’s Different about SEO Today Than in the Past?
While there are a lot of differences today compared to the last ten years or so when it comes to search engine optimization, the definition of SEO and its goals really haven’t changed. The goal was always for search engines to deliver to their audience the best information and search results according to the intent of the person searching.
But, it’s just taken a while for technology to catch up with the intent of the search engine. Because of that, marketers have taken advantage in the past of ways to trick search engines to send traffic their way. For a long time, more traffic was always considered better, even if that traffic wasn’t ideal. We all went after it. So how has SEO for your website changed?
FREE Checklist: SEO For Beginners
1. Content Is King But Now It’s Quality over Quantity
Your website needs content. Without content, you have nothing to say to your website visitors. But now your content needs to be quality content that really speaks to your audience in the way they want to be spoken to. That means you need to do a lot more research about your audience to get the kind of traffic you want now compared to the old days when you could throw up “spun” content and get all the traffic.
2. Link Farms Are Gone
In the old days, everyone submitted spun articles to content farms which were really link farms. It was a way to get links back to your site, known as backlinks. In the old days, we used to trade links with others too: “Link to me and I’ll like to you.” Today that isn’t done and could, in fact, ruin your search engine results ranking if you are being linked to spammy, low-quality sites or vice versa. Backlinks are still important but now it’s more important to forgo the backlink if it’s not a naturally earned backlink from an authoritative site.
3. Geographical Search Is In
Before, there just wasn’t a way to attract local search to your website the same as you can today. In fact, these days even national sites will focus on local areas that they want to target to show up in search results. For example, if you have a restaurant convenient to a highway, you want your site to show up to searchers on the road where they are.
4. Search Engine Page Results Are More Informative
Do a search for something that interests you and look at the results. Today, the results will give some background about the site and it might even show the about page, contact page and other information at a glance. In the old days, it just looked like a bunch of keywords showing up and was ugly. You had to click to find out if it was the right thing or not, and it wasn’t very informative like today. That means you now need to carefully word the meta description so that your audience will click through. If your website is built in WordPress you can use a SEO plugin like Yoast, which allows you to control the meta description and even see a preview of what it will look like before publishing the page.
5. Mobile Is a Priority in Search Results
Because more people are accessing the internet via mobile, search engines prioritize mobile-friendly sites over old-fashioned sites that aren’t responsive. How your site looks on all devices is important to your search results. If your audience can’t use your site on their mobile device, Google might not even show it to them.
6. Video Returns Better Search Results
Another thing that has changed is the increase of video online. Video is very important to your SEO marketing strategy. Audiences are more likely to share and engage with video than they are text-only content. That makes it more valuable to search engines than your other content. This doesn’t mean text content isn’t still important. It just means that you need to add video to your content marketing plan. Start with repurposing your most popular written content to video to test it out for yourself.
7. Keyword Stuffing Is Gone While Meaning Become More Important
Keywords are still a thing but understanding the intent of your audience so that you can assign meaning to your content will make a big difference in the quality of your traffic. In the old days, people used to create content that was basically nonsense content and spun articles with the keywords they wanted to be ranked for. They sometimes even used keywords that weren’t even relevant just to get the traffic. Today, you want to use one keyword per page, and you want to avoid using it more than at a 2% density.
Free Checklist: SEO For Your Website
Without SEO for your website, you’re just hoping that Google and the other search engines will somehow stumble across your website, figure out what you’re writing about, and then hopefully send relevant and targeted traffic to your website. You’ve put a lot of work into your website so it makes no sense to just pray for luck where traffic and success is concerned. To help you with your search engine optimization basics, download my free checklist, SEO Strategy Guide For Beginners.
