What Companies Should Know About How SEO Has Evolved
Content is king. People have used that phrase for as long as they have known of or heard about SEO. However, based on the evolution of SEO, content that ranks well today is nothing like the content that ranked during the early days of SEO. That tactics in SEO, as well as online digital marketing, that you used years ago don’t just fail to produce results. They can actively get you penalised by search engines. This means you get less traffic, which results in less revenue. Your cost per customer acquisition shoots up because you have to rely on other methods to get people to your website.
You need an SEO strategy that helps you to avoid the outdated practices that don’t work.
This article explores a brief history of SEO, allowing us to see how it has evolved over the years. You’ll understand the tweaks necessary to make your strategy more effective. Best of all, we’ll dive into SEO metrics and future trends and the actionable tips you can implement today.
SEO has come a long way since its inception, evolving alongside search engine algorithms, user behavior, and digital marketing trends. What once revolved around keyword stuffing and simple backlinks has transformed into a complex ecosystem that prioritizes high-quality content, mobile optimization, and user experience. The constant changes in SEO tactics mean businesses must adapt quickly to stay competitive. In this post, we’ll explore how SEO has evolved over the years and what that means for modern strategies in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.
We’re going to tackle five aspects of SEO and look at how things have changed since back in the day.
When did SEO actually begin?
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) began in the mid-1990s, shortly after the first search engines appeared. The earliest forms of search engines, such as Yahoo! (which started as a directory in 1994) and AltaVista (1995), helped users find information on the web. However, as the internet grew, search engines needed a way to organise and rank content effectively.
By 1997, the term “search engine optimisation” (SEO) started to be used as website owners realised they could improve their rankings by optimising their web pages with relevant keywords, meta tags, and creating quality content. Google, launched in 1998, revolutionised SEO with its PageRank algorithm, which ranked web pages based on the number and quality of links pointing to them, setting the foundation for modern SEO practices.
Since then, SEO has continually evolved, with search engines introducing new algorithms, ranking factors, and focusing more on user experience, content quality, and mobile-friendly designs. The goal of SEO has remained the same: to help websites appear on the search engine results page (SERP) in front of users actively searching for relevant information.
Who is considered the pioneer of SEO and why?
The pioneer of SEO is often considered to be Danny Sullivan, a prominent figure in the search engine marketing world. He is widely recognised for his significant contributions to the growth and development of SEO as a legitimate field.
Here’s why Sullivan considered a pioneer:
- Search Engine Watch: In 1996, Danny Sullivan founded Search Engine Watch, one of the first websites dedicated to helping businesses and individuals navigate the complexities of search engines and improve their online visibility. This platform played a key role in educating the public about the importance of SEO.
- Writing and Educating: Sullivan’s early writings and insights helped businesses understand how search engines worked and why search engine optimisation was essential for success. His clear, practical advice demystified SEO and made it more accessible.
- Search Engine Strategies Conference: In 1999, Danny co-founded the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference, which became one of the most important industry events for SEO professionals. The conference helped bring together experts and businesses to share knowledge and stay up-to-date with the evolving SEO landscape.
- Advocacy for Ethical SEO: Throughout his career, Sullivan advocated for ethical SEO practices and worked to combat “black-hat” tactics (such as keyword stuffing and link farming) that could damage the reputation of the industry.
Other individuals and companies also contributed to the early growth of SEO, Danny Sullivan’s commitment to education, transparency, and his role in shaping the industry has solidified his position as one of the most important pioneers of SEO.
Evolution of SEO: A Comparison of “Then” vs “Now” A Quick Overview
Keyword Usage
- Then (Early Days Of SEO): Keywords were the primary focus of SEO. Websites would stuff their pages with exact-match keywords to rank higher in search results. Over-optimisation was common, with little regard for user experience.
- Now (Modern SEO Approach): Keyword stuffing is a thing of the past. Search engines, especially Google, now use sophisticated algorithms that understand search intent. Content is more naturally written, with a focus on context, semantic relevance, and providing value to users. Latent semantic indexing (LSI) and variations of keywords are used to make content more readable and relevant.
Backlinks
- Then: Backlinks were a major ranking factor, and quantity was considered more important than quality. Websites would often engage in link farms, buying or exchanging links to boost their rankings.
- Now: Quality over quantity is key. Search engines now evaluate the relevance, trustworthiness, and authority of backlinks. Spammy backlinks can lead to penalties, and a focus on organic, high-quality link-building strategies, such as guest posts, influencer collaborations, and content partnerships, is essential.
Content
- Then: Content was often thin and repetitive, with the main goal being to satisfy keyword requirements. Long-form, detailed content wasn’t as common, and websites often relied on simple landing pages with limited text.
- Now: Content is king, but not just in terms of volume. Today’s content must be comprehensive, valuable, and user-centric. Google’s algorithms, like RankBrain and BERT, are designed to reward high-quality, informative, and well-researched content. Blogs, video content, and multimedia are all integral to modern SEO.
Mobile Optimization
- Then: Mobile optimization wasn’t a priority. Websites were designed primarily for desktop users, with mobile sites often being a secondary consideration. Many websites were not mobile-friendly.
- Now: Mobile-first indexing is the norm. Google uses the mobile version of a website for ranking and indexing purposes. Websites must be responsive and provide a seamless experience across all devices. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it could drastically hurt your rankings.
User Experience (UX)
- Then: User experience was often neglected in favour of SEO tactics. Websites focused on keywords and backlinks, sometimes at the expense of design, speed, and usability.
- Now: UX is crucial for SEO success. Search engines now consider metrics like page load speed, mobile responsiveness, and user engagement signals (bounce rate, time on site, etc.) when determining rankings. A seamless, fast, and intuitive experience for users can significantly boost your SEO efforts.
Social Signals
- Then: Social media wasn’t considered a direct ranking factor. SEO was largely isolated from social media strategies.
- Now: While social signals (likes, shares, comments) may not directly impact rankings, they play an indirect role in SEO. Social media helps increase brand visibility, drive traffic to your site, and build relationships, all of which can lead to more backlinks and increased site engagement—ultimately boosting rankings.
Technical SEO
- Then: Basic technical SEO elements were important, like having a site map, optimising meta tags, and ensuring proper keyword use. But technical SEO was often limited to just these elements.
- Now: Technical SEO has become much more complex. Factors like schema markup, site structure, URL optimisation, structured data, and secure connections (HTTPS) are now critical. Ensuring search engines can crawl and index your site effectively, without encountering errors, is more important than ever.
Local SEO
- Then: Local SEO wasn’t as prominent. Local businesses didn’t have a specific focus on optimising for location-based searches, and there was no Google My Business (GMB) to help them get found.
- Now: Local SEO is essential for small and medium-sized businesses targeting a specific geographic area. Google My Business (GMB) profiles, local keywords, and customer reviews are now crucial for ranking well in local search results. Google Maps and local pack results are increasingly important for visibility.
Algorithm Updates
- Then: SEO relied on a small number of search engine ranking factors. It was easier to game the system with keyword manipulation and backlinks. Google’s algorithm updates, like Panda and Penguin, were still in their early stages.
- Now: Algorithm updates are frequent and highly sophisticated, with major updates such as Core Web Vitals focusing on user experience and BERT understanding natural language. Websites must adapt quickly to changes in search engine algorithms and focus on delivering the best possible user experience.
AI and Machine Learning
- Then: SEO was heavily manual. Webmasters focused on on-page optimisation, backlinks, and keyword density.
- Now: AI and machine learning are transforming SEO. Algorithms like RankBrain and BERT use machine learning to understand user intent and the context behind search queries. AI-powered tools assist with keyword research, content creation, and SEO audits, automating many aspects of SEO and providing deeper insights.
SEO has evolved from a basic, keyword-focused approach to a more holistic, user-centric strategy. Today’s SEO emphasises content quality, technical precision, user experience, and adaptability to frequent algorithm changes. While the fundamentals remain important, success in modern SEO requires a broader, more nuanced approach.
What you need to know about the evolution of SEO
Back Then – Keyword Stuffing
Keywords are the first thing you think about when you hear SEO.
You need to put keywords into your content to let search engines know what you want to rank for.
In the early days of SEO, this meant writing content with the aim of stuffing as many keywords as possible into it.
Take this as an example:
That’s a perfect example of keyword stuffing. The writer clearly wants to rank for the keyword “content marketing” and has done everything they can to shoehorn the term into the piece.
This practice arose because of the concept of “keyword density”. The theory was that there was some magical ratio of keywords that you needed to insert to get your content to rank in search engines. Many put this density at 1%. If you had a 1,000 word piece, you needed to insert your keyword 10 times.
This actually worked when search engine algorithms were much simpler. However, tactics like these will get you nowhere now.
Today – Natural Use of Keyword Variations
Search engine algorithms understand your content a lot better now than they used to. They’re actively searching for readable content that provides value to readers.
Keyword stuffing doesn’t create that content. Search engines and humans alike want quality.
Today you need to use two techniques:
Use Keyword Variations Naturally. Once you’ve settled on a main keyword, think of all of the ways that you can vary it. For “men’s shoes” you could use alternate keywords like “men’s footwear”. You’re avoiding stuffing and Google’s smart enough to recognise the similarities between the terms. As importantly, use the keyword naturally. Don’t force it in five times for no reason.
Use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords. LSI keywords are search terms that relate to your content. However, they’re not synonyms or variations.
For our “men’s shoes” example, some good LSI keywords could break down the types of shoes, such as:
- Loafers
- Sneakers
- Dress shoes
These are all phrases that you’d expect to see in a piece about men’s shoes. However, they’re not direct synonyms of the phrase. They add a little more context to the piece so search engines can get a better idea of what you’re writing about.
Of course, that assumes that you’re writing a piece that comfortably incorporates the LSI keywords.
A tool like LSIGraph can help you to come up with good LSI keywords:
Figure 1 – https://lsigraph.com/analysis/
Back Then – Exact Keyword Matching
This relates to how you link to other areas of your website.
For example, if you wanted to link from a blog post to your website’s content marketing page, you’d create something like this.
That’s an example of using an exact match keyword as anchor text for a link. Anchor text aims to tell the reader what they’ll see if they click on the link.
That on its own isn’t a problem. It’s when you get something like this that exact match keywords become an issue:
Again, this worked back in the day. Today, it just tells Google exactly how you’re trying to influence search engine rankings.
Worse yet, a lot of SEO marketers would then create similar content for each variation of those terms.
Today – Intent Matching
Today, it’s all about matching your content to the user’s intent, rather than using exact match keywords.
That’s important if you have a lot of keywords that share a similar intent. If they all serve the same purpose, lump them together into a single piece of content.
Create a single page that serves the user’s intent in searching for one of those keywords. Don’t make them navigate through reams of exact match keywords and anchor text to get where they need to go.
Back Then – Only Using Keywords in the Title and Content Body
Your title element and the main body of your content are always mentioned as the main places to put keywords.
That led to most people focusing on those tags and doing nothing with any other tags.
They’d optimise a little and it would do the job a couple of decades ago. Today, focusing only on those two tags doesn’t get you anywhere.
Today – Well-Rounded Optimisation
Today, title tags and keywords in the body of the content are still important.
However, now they’re part of the bigger picture. Google will still look at them to figure out what the content’s about. However, there are other things to optimise that you can’t miss out on. They mean you can optimise for both search engines AND humans.
These include:
Headline Tags. These are the headings and subheadings that you wrap in H1, H2, etc. tags. Search engines look to those for more context.
The URL. Nobody knows what they’re looking at when they see a URL like “www.example.com/product/category1/f4057fvw9”. Try to include keywords or something else that indicates what the page contains in the URL. For example, “www.example.com/products/smartphones/iphone7”.
Meta Descriptions. Searchers see your page’s meta description as part of result that search engines present to them:
It doesn’t improve your rankings on its own. However, it does show the searcher what they’ll get if they click on your page. If the meta description matches the query, the searcher is more likely to click. More clicks lead to more chances of selling. Plus, that user interest may influence your rankings.
Image Alt Tags. There are several reasons to include an alt tag for every image that you use.
Firstly, you’re improving website accessibility. People with limited visibility who uses text-to-voice software rely on alt tags to tell them what an image represents.
Secondly, you can slot a keyword into the alt tag without messing up your content.
Finally, good alt tags can improve your ranking in Google Images, which can become a great source of traffic.
Back Then – Unnatural and Spammy Links
There are all sorts of unnatural linking tactics that people used to improve site rankings ages ago.
Such techniques included:
- Placing a link to their website on as many directory sites as possible.
- Spamming forums and blog comment sections with links
- Asking for reciprocal links from websites that also wanted to build their link profiles.
- Placing links in website footers (this was especially popular among website developers)
And that just covers getting inbound links.
There are plenty of ways to create unnatural outbound links and internal links too. The use of exact match anchor text covered above is one. Some companies also try to hide links where you’d never think to look for them, such as on a full stop.
Even Google got caught using that last one under the guise of its parent company, Alphabet:
Search engines are wise to these tactics now and will punish you for building low quality links. You may find your website demoted in rankings. At worse, you can get a manual penalty that removes you from the index entirely.
Today – Quality and Relevant Links Rule All
One backlink from a high-quality and relevant source overrides hundreds of low-quality links.
Backlinks are important don’t have the power that they once had. They’re still important. However, it’s high quality content that answers queries that should be your main source of links.
The stats bear that out too. A website with a blog attracts 97% more natural links than a website without one.
Content is the key strategy to building good links in the modern era of SEO.
Back Then – Web Design Focused on Intrusive Ads and Elements
The user experience wasn’t at the top of the website developer’s mind during the early days of SEO. They wanted sites with tons of ads and other elements that just got in the way. Pop-up ads are a relic of that period.
Again, many went overboard. These ads and elements became so intrusive that they distracted away from the content on the website.
That’s still an issue today. Take a look at this page:
Figure 3 – https://monetizepros.com/ad-implementation/how-to-make-money-with-pop-up-ads/
It’s not easy to see what that page is about. It looks like a pop-up ad has even hidden the main body of the content.
Layouts like these became the norm because they generated revenue. Early search engines couldn’t detect the usability issues they caused.
Today – You Need a Seamless UX
It’s a lie to claim that ads don’t exist on modern day websites. They’re how a lot of webmasters earn their money.
However, the user experience (UX) is the key focus now. Sites that perform well offer clear navigation and don’t obscure their content behind ads.
They’re also designed to work well on all devices.
A great website displays as well on mobile devices as it does on desktops. In fact, that’s crucial as more people browse the web using mobile devices than they do using desktops.
You need to create a seamless UX.
A good UX keeps visitors engaged and prevents them from bouncing away. This shows search engines that people engage with your content.
Search engines are more likely to rank you if they see that people don’t immediately hit the back button after clicking on your site.
Quick Tips for Creating Content That Ranks
Let’s round this out with a couple of quick tips for how to rank:
- Create content for humans first and search engines second.
- Ensure your content matches user intent to increase engagement.
- Focus on creating a seamless UX that keeps people on your site once they’ve clicked.
- Ensure your website displays well on all devices.
- Present content in a variety of ways. For example, articles, videos, and infographics.
The Evolution of SEO: Adapting to AI and the Future of Digital Search
The world of SEO is constantly evolving, with new technologies and trends shaping how search engines rank and display content. One of the most significant advancements in recent years is the rise of AI-driven SEO tools and strategies. These innovations have made it possible for marketers to optimize content more efficiently, analyze user behavior, and predict search trends with greater accuracy. AI is not just transforming how we optimize websites but also how search engines understand and rank content.
Looking ahead, the future of SEO is likely to be heavily influenced by advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. These technologies will continue to refine how search engines interpret queries, offering more personalized and relevant results. As AI becomes an even more integral part of SEO, it will allow businesses to create content that resonates with search engines and users alike.
In addition to AI, voice search is rapidly changing how people interact with search engines. With the growing use of virtual assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa, optimizing for voice search has become essential. Voice search queries tend to be longer and more conversational, which means SEO strategies must adapt to capture this shift in user behavior. As the technology evolves, understanding the nuances of voice search will become a key component of successful SEO strategies moving forward.
Evolution Of SEO – The Final Word
SEO has evolved enormously since the early days of search engines. The techniques that got results back in 2000 could seriously damage your website today and get you penalized by Google.
It’s all about finding the right balance between creating user-friendly content that’s also good for search engines.
It’s not an easy task, which means you may need some help. That’s where we, Australia’s top SEO agency, come in.
