A Little Bit About SEO Strategies in 2018

Search Engine Optimization has been on the lime light since the rapid growth of internet and ecommerce business since 2000.

The purpose of SEO in simple terms is to take a web page and make it appear in top psoitions of search result pages for a set of desired search queries. Before venturing more into the activitites involved in SEO. Let's understand few things about search engines and thier purpose.

Search engines like google, yahoo, bing, yandex etc serves the billions of internet users by helping them to find the exact information they are looking for in the internet. Without search engines, browsing internet wont be so fun.

The major source of all search engines including google is from the ads and the customers are daily internet users. Hence the prime objective of search engines is to meet the expectation of its users by providing the best possible research for their search queries.

Search engines have no benefit from SEO's and SEO companies. In fact, SEO companies exploits the loop holes in search engines algorithm that decide which web pages should be shown for a search query. But google evolves at a very rapid pace these days. 10 years back it was very easy to manupulate google search results. We just need to stuff in the keywords we are targeting in the web page content and it will make us out-rank a quality website with less keyword density. It was as simple as that.

But with the introduction of rank brain in 2012 google have evolved to a very advanced level, that it began to understand the menaing of a search query rather than the keywords. Google now has a very vast collection of user search habbits which they used to form the "Knowledge graph" which understand the users intent and context behind a search query. SEO is not all about keywords now.

Since the last couple of years, the google have evolved rapidly that the chances of ranking for a web page with quality content and no SEO is very high these days compared to web pages with low quality content an high SEO efforts.

Google has the best of data engineers and programmers available in the whole world. In 2018 it is more sensible to align with the googles guidelines for content quality rather than trying to manupulate the loopholes in their algorithm to rank well. There aren't much loop holes there to exploit in 2018.

For most new SEO's its all about building links, spamming blogs with commenting, directories, listings etc which does not take any effort or time. As google is evolving every year, seo is becoming less and less about link building (at least through the above strategies).
Most people turns a blind eye towards website architecture, content quality and planning when it comes to SEO.
When I think about it is simple, good products are easy to sell and bad products are not. If your website adds value in your niche and contents are of high quality then rankings is something that will naturally come to you. Other websites naturally link back to quality content, in fact that's the whole idea why google sees backlinks as one of the strong ranking signal even now.
It is so hard and so not reliable when we manipulate the google algorithm to show shitty pages on to top. Even if you succeed in doing that, the results are not stable. If users are lead to a bad page, they will bounce and your page will eventually go down in rankings. So the first and most important thing that the SEO companies should do is to conduct a usability analysis and make sure the website ads value to its audience.