SEO Then and Now

SEO Then and Now SEO is an industry that is changing all the time and if you don’t keep up you’ll get left behind. In the earlier days of SEO it was more about technology and it was the tech people/developers creating optimization strategies. Now SEO has become a marketing function since it’s more about building a brand. Let’s take a look back at the SEO landscape circa 2004 to see how far the search and SEO industry has come in less than a decade. It Was All About Links. The focus wasn’t so much on creating content but more about building links, and lots of them. SEO professionals participated in tactics that are now considered to be black hat. This wasn’t because we were trying to be sneaky, but because we really didn’t know better. In fact, people were hired for full time link exchanging jobs. Imagine that? It Wasn’t All About Google. In 2004 Google was certainly a big player in the search game, but it wasn’t the King that it is now. People were still frequenting Yahoo!, Ask, and even AOL to find information. There Were No (or Very Little) Google SEO Tools. Tools that we now take for granted like the Google Keyword Research Tool and Google Analytics didn’t exist. Previously, you had to spend a lot of money for analytics information or simply rely on hit counters (remember those?) that were on the bottom of a website to see how many people had visited. When it came to keyword research we were just left to guess and assume what keywords and keyword phrases to use. Basically, we had a lot less free data and information to work off of. There was social media. MySpace was really growing in popularity around that time and Mark Zuckerberg had recently launched Facebook. However, it hadn’t been taken over by marketers and was mostly a place for college students to “poke” each other, whatever that means. If you wanted to share something, you still copied and pasted a link into an email. Basically, social media and SEO didn’t really mesh the way that they do now. Ranking Factors Were Different. Search engine rankings didn’t jump up and down and remained pretty steady back in the day. They weren’t personalized as they are now and there was much less focus on local search. As you can see SEO has become much more advanced in the last seven or so years. The focus has shifted and is now concentrated on creating content to build a brand. Quality is much more important than quantity. Now that we’ve looked back, let’s try and look ahead. What do you think SEO will look like in five, ten years?