Can you relax?

So you have designed your version of the perfect website, you have taken into account all that the search engines have told you to, you have design it all down to the exact detail, doing your research comparing and adjusting and finally you think you have got it right. After some time you start to see increase in the search engine results and you are beginning to believe that your search engine optimisation strategy is starting to pay off. Then you hear that there is going to be an upcoming algorithm change on one of the major search engines, and you know when one changes often others will follow.

That’s the problem with the internet, it never stops evolving. Never slows down for anyone. That is why search engine optimisation is not a once off deal, it is a continued business process. There is a slight reprieve to the constant change, Google for example last had a major algorithm change around 2005, where it saw sites that were ranked within the top twenty fall to the 65th page and never really regained any position. This can be very worrying to any website designer or any company with a website for that matter.

Small and constant changes

Although we are currently on the cusp of another major change, generally speaking the changes are small and easier to adjust to, given that your initial SEO strategy does not include any black hat or unethical methods of search engine optimisation.

Most changes to algorithms are to improve that results of search engines. They are to provide the search engine’s customers with a better service, therefore if there are those websites out there cheating the system then the search engine engineers are going to work until they close that loop hole down.

Sleepless SEO

It doesn’t need to cause sleepless nights, any major changes are for the better, for example meta tags use to be heavily weighted in the algorithms of many search engines, only to now no longer carry any real weight. This change was due to the abuse of meta-tags, the same applies to the use of key words, website use to hide key words that could not be seen by the user to increase the sites rankings, now keywords are not all it takes.

Algorithms have become so accurate and so advanced that they not only take into account the key words but also the other words in the text, the ontology of content. For example if a website selling “snooker Cues”, the algorithm will not only take note and weight the words “snooker cue” but also take into account the words around it, such as past players, cloth types, table types accessories etc. all these words will ad to the weight of the keywords.

This will force website to avoid flooding content with keyword purely as a search engine optimisation tactic, and rather have content for the purpose of the user. Make the content useful informative and regularly updated.

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