Search engines have been transformed and grown leaps and bounds in the last ten years. The computer science powering search technology and information revival is much more sophisticated and intelligent than ever. Voice search and mobile search have entirely changed how users find and consume information; everyone – we mean everyone – is in on the content thing.
As the algorithms of search engines change, so does Search Engine Optimization. The days of simple keyword placement and link building are gone. Don’t get us wrong – those principles are still the foundation of search; however, where before you could optimize a title tag and description with a single keyword, you must now optimize your entire website for a universe of highly targeted keywords: same principles but newer techniques.
-
- MOBILE-FIRST
In the initial days of the digital paradigm shift, only one device existed. However, there are hundreds of devices and twice as many screen sizes. Mobile-first indexing means that search engines mainly focus on making the mobile experience worthwhile while empowering SERPs and influencer rankings.
By optimizing your website as mobile-first, it is paramount that the mobile experience must be optimized for search.
What that can include is:
-
- Making sure that your mobile site (if a separate domain) has high-quality content and informative, structured data
- Optimizing metadata for a mobile experience. This means enhancing the quality of titles and meta descriptions for mobile crawlers and mobile searchers.
- Properly verifying your mobile site with Search Console, ensuring country/language mobile variants are notated with the .
Voice search is also adding contextuality to language comprehension. Google’s indices have been using natural language processing and voice search recently. Voice search and the use of natural language processing have become more widespread. Hence, keyword research needs to reflect that.
-
- STRUCTURED DATA
Structured data is more than just Schema.org. Search engines applaud the excellent direction and the better, the more elaborated content. In tests we’ve performed at Tathagat Media, we’ve seen markup displayed in the SERPs populated through old-fashioned tables.
The critical point to note here is that the relationships of data points are clear to Google. This implies that we must embrace the semantic structural opportunity at any time and provide Google with the proper order to display that data best.
-
- SPEED
Site speed is a significant factor that can impact a website’s SEO performance and how it is crawled and rendered by search engines. The Critical Rendering Path can be a practical starting point for improving site speed, and SEOs should consider the minimal requirements for a page to be properly rendered.
However, it is essential to remember that recommendations for improving site speed should be actionable and practical, as significant database changes can be resource-intensive. It is necessary for modern SEOs to carefully balance the benefits of improving site speed with the time and resources required to make those improvements.
-
- CONTENT
The use of traditional content, such as words, keywords, phrases, topics, and themes, remains crucial in determining a website’s ranking on search engines.
The algorithms used to process this content have evolved over time and now focus on analyzing the meaning and relationships between words, taking into account factors such as phrase length, co-occurring keywords, synonyms, close variants, page segmentation, and phrase-based indexing.
Keyword usage remains a critical element of these algorithms, with individual words and phrases analyzed as tokens to identify patterns and correlations.
Search engines pay close attention to keyword relationships and comparable alternatives, and synonyms and close variants can provide valuable insights into the content of a webpage.
However, it is essential to note that the specific techniques and technologies used to process and analyze this content may have changed and continued to evolve.
-
- AUTHORITY
Link building remains a crucial component of modern SEO, and building authority is still an important goal. However, it is essential to understand that link-building should not be performed in a vacuum. PageRank is still a crucial metric in determining a website’s authority, and understanding this metric is critical for optimizing the impact of link building. Authority building in the past relied heavily on metrics such as Page Authority, Domain Authority, Citation Rank, etc., which are based on PageRank. These metrics provide valuable indications of a page’s authority, but it’s essential to remember that they are only estimates.
-
- INTEGRATED SEARCH
Google does not use data from Google Analytics for its search ranking algorithms due to privacy and legal restrictions. Instead, it analyzes the query and clicks logs to determine the success of its search engine results pages (SERPs). These evaluation measures differ from website metrics such as bounce rate and time on page.
Data from query and click logs contains extensive information about user behavior during a search session and whether the session was successful. Although Google has stated that query logs are noisy and constantly changing, research by Rand Fishkin and the Time-Based Ranking Patent suggests that Google uses this data.
The search landscape has changed significantly, and SEOs must adapt to keep up with the ever-evolving SERPs. While the fundamentals of keyword research and content optimization remain essential, the methods used by search engines to index, qualify, and serve results have evolved.
Modern SEOs must understand the advanced technology behind search to optimize and rank content in today’s landscape effectively.
Leave a comment and let us know how you use these new concepts in your SEO practice!
