What SMBs Need to Know About Ever-changing SEO
Over the past few years, Google has repeatedly rocked the world of search engine optimization (SEO). In its efforts to provide people the most relevant, spam-free results, the search engine giant has made several major upgrades to its search algorithm. The changes have been dubbed Panda (which punishes low-quality sites), Penguin (which demotes sites that engage in shady link building), and Hummingbird (which pays more attention to the context of queries, among other things).
Most recently, on May 20, Google released an update to its Payday Loan Algorithm (aimed at spammy queries), which was originally released in 2013.
Those who practice SEO have struggled to keep up with all the changes. If you're a small business owner or online marketer, here's what you need to know to succeed in SEO today.
White-hat SEOthe type you should practice by following Google's guidelines for a "Google-friendly site"has always been about creating high-quality content. Over the years, however, many marketers and small businesses have drifted into "gray-hat" or "black-hat" SEO tactics to try and get a leg up on competitors. Such tactics often involved publishing spammy, low-quality content stuffed with keywords, buying links from questionable sources, and so on.
To win at SEO today, and for the foreseeable future, focus instead on producing high-quality content, period. In fact, the Google algorithm changes in recent years give a big push to content marketingthe practice of using content as a marketing tool to attract new customers. (See Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses for more information.)
What does high-quality content mean, exactly? You don't need to hire a Pulitzer-prize winning author. Just create useful, interesting, topical, insightful content for your target audience and make that content easy to share on social media.
As a way of marketing themselves, many consultants and other small businesses often rely on a static website to act as an online brochure. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But when you add a blog, suddenly you have a much more dynamic websiteone that's refreshed regularly with new content.
Google makes an assumption that its users typically look for the freshest content on a topic. As a result, the search engine often ranks regularly updated websites over static ones. Regularly posting to a blog can help the blog (or the website where it lives) rank well in Google search results.
Optimizing your blog posts and website pages with relevant keywords has always been the easiest part of SEO, because it's directly within your control. And keywords are still important to SEO. They help Google understand the subject matter of a page or a piece of content.
But keyword phrases are becoming less important to search ranking success. With its big Hummingbird update, Google moves more toward an environment in which its users "talk" to its search engine using natural language queries. Speaking a search query into Google on your Android smartphone is but one example of this trend.
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What SMBs Need to Know About Ever-changing SEO