The Changing Tides of SEO - Sands of Time
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If you know anything about sand, you know that it is constantly changing its face. No matter if you are regarding the sands of the desert or the sands of a beach, elements like wind, rain, animals, and the sea itself all contribute to how the sand changes. There is a biblical saying that a foolish man builds his house on the sand, but a wise man builds his on a foundation of solid rock.
In the case of the Internet, it is like building your house on the sand if you only build your website for the search engines. You will constantly be moving your house to higher ground, or watching it disintegrate right before your eyes. There are, however, foundations of solid rock on which to build your website.
Building upon Solid Rock
Every website is unique (or should be), just as people's houses are unique. Sure, those houses may have the exact same floor plan as the next door neighbors', but the way those houses are furnished and decorated are completely different. The one thing that good homes all have in common, however, are sound foundations. And what is the foundation for websites of which I speak? Well, it's not as concrete as a home's foundation might be. But good content, filled with the correct density of keywords, inbound links developed naturally, and good, spiderable navigation all are part of it.
If we look at some of the characteristics of the primitive search engines we looked at earlier, and think about those elements that still remain in today's search engines, we may gain insight as to what we need to emphasize and build upon when optimizing our websites. Backlinks are one of those, as seen in even the early days of Google; text pages, or content, are another, as evidenced by WebCrawler, which searched the text in pages. I challenge you to look deeper for other clues as to what elements have remained true during the test of time.
In a Sea, er, Nut-Shell
Search engine optimization has evolved into an almost mammoth undertaking for any webmaster. So where do we go from here? While no one can predict what the future will hold for the SEO industry, what we do know is that the need for information, and a way to search for that information, will always exist. And because the search engines have given everyone a taste of that, we will never go back again.
While there may be all new ways to keep up to date on the current SEO tides, there are still those main foundations upon which to build, and there are precious few of these that never have, and probably never will, change.
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