SEO is changing all the time. The relevancy formulas are especially changing as the search engines get more sophisticated. Let's look at where they're headed now and how it may affect how you execute your SEO strategy.
While I expect the search engines will continue to get better and better and be able to find everyone's web sites' important information, it will never hurt to keep their jobs simple by ensuring your web site is created with good, valid HTML code that's easy to crawl through.
Search engine spiders are designed to be somewhat dumb creatures. So while they will evolve in the next few years, I would still not recommend creating all Flash sites or sites that are completely image-based, if you want to be sure to be found for the keyword phrases that relate to what you offer. The search engines are now showing news results, video results, shopping results and even real-time social media results right in their search results pages for many search queries.
They plan to do a lot more of this type of thing in the future. This means that in order to compete, the more ways you drive people to your content, the more ways you'll have of being found through search. If you're participating in social media, your tweets and other updates may be seen in the first page of Google, right alongside some industry news.
If you have videos embedded on your site, they can show up right there in the search results as well. Creating all different types of content on a regular basis will keep your site front and centre for all types of searches. Let's face it. The search engines want you to click on the sponsored ads, not the free search results, as that's how they get paid.
While they don't mind providing you with lots of great informational content in the free listings, they would prefer to show you product and service types of results in the sponsored links. This is a key element to think about, because it means more than ever you'll need to go above and beyond just having product and services pages if you want to show up in search. All that great link-worthy content you create may at some point be the only thing showing up for many search queries.
So you'll need to continue to create it and promote it and use it to drive people to your paid offerings. While that's true that small business SEO UKchanges a lot all the time, what's interesting to note is that in all the time that I've been doing SEO, since 1995, one thing has never changed.
I recently went through my SEO articles for the past ten years and that was the one consistent theme throughout all of them. That aspect of SEO will never change. As long as you keep the search engine's goal in mind, finding the best content for their users, and use that as your SEO mantra, your site will be resistant to whatever the algorithm changes of the day might be. This was true in 1995 and it's still true today.
Optimizing content for mobile devices
Designing for mobile is not just about creating websites that look good on small screens; it's about carefully stripping down a site to just the content that's most important to a mobile user.
Using and heading section headings
When you visit a site using a normal browser, it's usually easy to understand where and what the different sections are because of the layout and design of the site.
Writing new content for users and search engines
When SEOing a website, most will need new keyword rich content added to pages. It doesn't necessarily have to be a lot of content, but there should always be some information that tells the user and the search engines exactly what this page is all about.
