SEO changes 2014

SEO (still) isn't dead and won't be until the day that search engines can no longer drive important traffic to websites .

Search engine optimization residue an important part of the digital marketing landscape, and the path to long term achievement is relatively the same as it has always been.

Common SEO Campaign Activities

The basic essentials of SEO are still important and if done correctly, will still yield favorable results. Here are some SEO basics that have remained relatively unchanged (note this list isn't intended to be comprehensive):

Keyword Research

Not much here has changed apart from the tactics of how you go about understanding which words are being used by your audience to search for your products, services, or content.

Keyword research is still the same exercise in human behavior modeling and thoughtful how people are using language to search. Only the data sources have slightly changed and people are more aware of the significance of long-tail keywords.

Internal Link arrangement

People often say that PageRank is dead. However I invite you to attempt to rank a page for any significant keyword with zero internal links pointing at it and see how far you get.

I don't advocate obsessing over toolbar PageRank, but accepting how PageRank works and how that affects your site's internal link structure will help you rank in any search engine, not just Google.

Ongoing Performance Analysis

Certainly the case can be made that recent changes with keyword "(not provided)" has impacted our capability to measure SEO performance. No one can argue that.

All of these actions are still as important today as they have ever been, albeit more difficult because of the lack of keyword referral data.

Link Building & Content Marketing

I hear people say that Penguin completely changed SEO forever. I disagree. What it did do was make it so that everyonehas to do link building that adheres to most excellent practices.

Links are supposed to be a vote of relevancy based on the power of the content that they link to. Many people have been doing SEO for years the right way and never had to change anything as a result of these updates. What Penguin did was abolish the value of low-quality links that never should have counted anyway.

In terms of acquiring links, people talk about content marketing like it is some new thing. Content marketing was here before the Internet and has been doing well ever since.

What Has Changed?

All search engines want to rank the most related resource for any given keyword at the top of their results page. Doing so keeps users coming back, which makes search engines money. Thus search engines reward outstanding content with high rankings.

If you want to be the most applicable resource for a scrupulous keyword, you have to provide the content, and finally the supporting business model, that justifies your company's website having that ranking.

Conclusion

The next time someone tries to tell you that SEO is dead or that SEO is totally changed, take it with a grain of salt.

My advice is to disregard all of that chatter, get back to SEO basics, produce great content that is related to your audience about the keywords that you're targeting, build links by marketing that content to the right audience, analyze your show, and adjust thus.

SEO is going to be here for the foreseeable future. It still produces an outstanding ROI and improves user experience, if done correctly.

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