Every so often, the media likes to herald that SEO is dead. That marketers abused it until it lost all meaning, making it now a completely useless content technique. This declaration has been made for years, and yet SEO is still around and going strong. However, the media is partially right about one thing. There are some sleazy marketers out there, who abuse the system and ruin it for everyone else. A lot of traditional SEO companies have gained a bad reputation when it comes to their business practices, and that bad reputation has extended to SEO itself in many people’s minds. But that doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. It just means it’s changing shape.
What IS happening is that Google is cracking down on those sleazy “black hat” marketers who are shockingly prevalent in “traditional” SEO companies, and who try to rig the game for the sites they represent. They attempt to boost their search rankings by including certain words repeatedly again on their site, ad nauseam, with no context. Sometimes they’ll hide the text by making it the same color as the background, or putting it somewhere on the page that’s not easily accessible. Because in the end, they don’t need anyone to read it. It’s just a means to an end.
Google is constantly changing and updating its search algorithms, though, to guard against things like that. The algorithms are designed to determine whether a word is repeated too often, and if there’s any context to it. A site that doesn’t meet the requirements loses its search rankings very quickly, making sure no one can find it anymore.
Another way black hat marketers are getting in trouble is through backlinking. This is the other criterion Google looks at to determine search ranking: how many other sites are linking to the page in question? More backlinks mean, in theory, that a site is more popular and in demand, which in turn means it should rank higher, so that people can find it more easily.
Unfortunately, this is also a very easy criterion to cheat on. The black hats will link to a single page from hundreds of places all over the web, in order to drive their search ranking up. So Google’s algorithms safeguard against that, too. If a site’s backlinks go up too much, too quickly, it’s penalized rather than rewarded, and its search rankings go way down.
So, then, what kind of pages ARE able to boost their search engine rankings? The kind that inbound marketing was created for in the first place. Google looks for unique content that’s regularly updated. It scans to make sure that there’s enough variety in the text and that words aren’t repeated too often. And what about keywords? Keywords are encouraged. They’re still a great tool for driving audiences to a site, and Google recognizes that. But only when used in moderation. It’s a new era for SEO. Black hat SEO companies are on their way out, being replaced by companies who create real, useful content, that’s genuinely helpful to audiences. To paraphrase an old saying: SEO is dead. Long live the new SEO.
