I’ve said on several occasions that the world of search engine optimization has changed a great deal over the past few years. With the rise to prominence of social media, we’ve seen an entirely new paradigm take hold. Rather than being about the search engine, today’s SEO is far more focused on the people using it.
Let’s talk about that.
Back when the Internet was still a relatively new technology – back before Google became the unstoppable corporate behemoth it is today – technical SEO reigned supreme. Although content marketing did still exist back then, it was largely considered optional by most SEO experts. It didn’t exactly matter how good your website was if no one could find it. What this meant was that techniques such as article/directory submissions, spinning content, keyword stuffing, and optimized meta descriptions were valued above all else.
So…what changed?
Well…Google, for one. Since shortly after it was founded, Google set its engineers to work trying to figure out a means of delivering better, more organic search results to its users. From 2005 through to 2010, the company released a number of updates targeted at ‘crap-hat’ SEO techniques. Then, in 2011, it dealt its most devastating blow yet to traditional SEO (which arguably served as its death knell): the Panda update. Designed to crack down on thin content and content farms, Panda impacted somewhere around 12% of search results – a staggeringly large number, when one considers the size of Google’s search engine.
Although there’s still some contention on what the Hummingbird update actually did, most agree that it’s placed even more of a focus on organic search results, and on delivering a user the page that best suits their needs (rather than the one with the best optimization).
Google’s attack on inorganic search results
While Google’s attack on inorganic search results has certainly contributed to the shift in SEO, it’s far from the only factor. There’s also the meteoric rise to prominence of social media. It started slowly at first, through websites like MySpace. Then along came Facebook, and the marketing world was turned on its head – it hasn’t been the same since. Suddenly, consumers were all but demanding that they receive an unprecedented level of consideration in their interactions with the enterprise sector – and they had the power to realize those demands.
As many brands were quick to find out, what may have been a simple blunder before the age of Facebook could, if not properly managed, turn into an outright catastrophe. Similarly, a brand which managed to impress its consumers – whether through its actions or through high-quality content – could find itself rocketed to fame in a matter of days. With social media, viral marketing truly came into its own; the importance of high-quality content was driven home far more by this than by anything Google could have done.
Since its inception, the very core of Search Engine Optimization has changed. Although technical SEO does still play a (comparatively small) part in ranking, these days success is tied far more to creating top-notch content and finding success on social media than it is about trying to sort out what Google’s algorithms are thinking.
Content is king, as the old cliché goes – and social media is its queen.
