For almost twenty years, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been used as an online marketing tool. And over that time span, SEO has changed and evolved as search engines, themselves, have grown and matured. The basic fundamentals of SEO are still important, however, and if done correctly will still yield favorable results. Content, performance, authority, and user experience are all concepts that have remained relatively constant.
Perhaps the major change in SEO began about a decade ago when Google became the top search engine and SEO authority, setting the bulk of SEO rules and standards. By changing its algorithms and administering discipline through search engine filters such as Panda and Penguin, Google severely restricted people who were trying to cheat the system by stuffing their websites with keywords or low-quality links in order to achieve high page rankings. Google and other search engines quickly put a stop to that practice, but in doing so, they have diminished the utility of keywords in general.
Over time, then, SEO’s new mantra became “content, content, content.