Lately, many marketers and business owners have some doubts about the effectiveness of SEO and whether SEO still plays an important role to bring more business to the company. Some will even argue that it is the contents of the website that attracts more viewers than doing search engine optimization.
Although it is now possible to use alternative methods such as social media marketing or video marketing to improve the website ranking other than just relying on search engine optimization alone. SEO still plays an important role in the search engine to build the website ranking as it works hand in hand with link building and content marketing to compete for high ranking.
In the past, major search engines such as Google has many issues with bad SEO practices like keyword stuffing, spamming or poor quality contents with multiple links. But it’s a different story now as the search engine’s algorithm has improved vastly and any website that practice “black hat” SEO methods will be penalized by Google as this methods are cheating the system and do not offer any real value to the searchers.
With the latest updates from Penguin and Panda algorithm, Google has greatly reduced the percentage of keyword stuffing and artificial page rankings that appear in their search engine that in turn focus on the importance of high-quality content with relevant context and semantics. These changes in the algorithm not only make sure that content writers will be using proper SEO practices to improve the page ranking. Search engines also play their part to ensure that their users will get the most accurate and best results as long as they follow the terms and conditions set by the search engine’s company.
Statistics have proven that companies receive more business inquiries from mobile devices as compared to those people using PCs or laptops. As a result, there are penalties from the search engines for those who do not design a mobile version of their website. This is to meet the standards set by the search engines to allow their contents to be more visible to the search engine’s algorithm due to the fact that more and more consumers are using their mobile devices to search for information or purchase things online.
Although SEO is constantly evolving to keep up with the consumer trends and searching behavior. It is no surprise that many SEO experts did not really condemn the use of SEO practices but instead offering advice on how to utilize it properly. While it may be true that the old method of doing SEO is obsolete. One must understand that SEO results are determined by the user’s searching behavior on the internet and are often influenced by many external factors such as social media influence, better technology that provides more options to search for information online and much more. This means that SEO will always be prevalent and necessary to rank the website for now and the future.
