Evolution of the search engine has made great steps over the past decade. Initially we were presented with a variety of different search engines such as ask, Alta Vista, Yahoo and then along came Google. Google was a bit of a game changer, subsequently taking over the market of search engines. Its look has stayed the same however the functionality has significantly changed from the early days.
Early search engine marketing
Initially site started off with the rent on the content within the site, so if your business was selling red training shoes and your site mentioned several times throughout it the keyword “red training shoes” there was a good chance that you would be ranked highly for those keywords. There are also places within the pages of the site that the developers would specifically place the appropriate keywords, these are known as meta tags. However, the search engines and again in particular Google spotted that the use of keywords was being abused and some sites were just pushing their keyword again and again in a page in order to get the rankings up. This sometimes meant that not the most appropriate site rank higher against other more popular sites. So, search engines had to work out how to produce results based on popularity.
Search engine algorithms
So, the evolution of the search engine algorithms grew at a pace, looking at all different ways in which they could assess how popular a website is. One of the key ways is having a look at “offsite” methods to see how popular a site is. So, they started counting the number of external links pointing to a site, and in effect view in each of these links as a vote of approval for the site. And again this got abused by people trying to optimise the site so the search engines got smarter and made sure that the links were from other appropriate high rank sites. So, if a link was coming from the BBC website this would hold much more credibility than if you have 100 links from very poor websites that you had created just for the sole purpose of creating external links.
So the battle began between search engine optimisers and the search engines in order to try and outsmart each other. Much as you would have athletes trying to improve themselves for athletic competition. Some athletes will try to use banned drugs just as some online marketing companies may use black hat methods in order to gain better results. Ultimately though as we all know good will always prevail in the drug cheats will get caught in the black hat methods will always be overcome in new updates to the algorithms. Hence that is why at Smart Cow Marketing we will only use our methods in order to gain an increase in the rankings. And logically this always tends to be the best method as the ultimate goal for the search engines is to provide relevant content and we believe that white hat methods are the only way to ensure that your site is represented accurately on the web.
External links mean votes
So as these votes/external links and on-site content help the search engines decide which sites to promote depending on the keywords the search engines continue to look at new ways to enhance the user experience in providing the most relevant content. With the recent surge in social media sites is becoming much more apparent in the results of search engines and they are looking at content and recommendations within these media channels as yet another voter approval for the relevance of websites.
The search engines are constantly upgrading their algorithms that work out which sites should be placed above another which has a twofold effect. Firstly, it is great for the use of the search engines because it means that the results are always going to be the most appropriate results for our keyword searches and they are becoming more and more intelligent as time goes on. Secondly, it means that businesses do have to work hard at in ensuring there site is producing relevant content and is ranked appropriately. We have moved light-years the days of having a website for “red training shoes” was just enough, you now have to work at keeping your site and online presence relevant just as much as if you were a store owner and needed to keep your shop clean and smart for new visitors to find your products clearly.
London SEO agency
Smart Cow Marketing is an agency based in south of London in Croydon. We work hard for our clients to ensure their sites get noticed online, getting great results for the appropriate keywords. We have seen some of our clients who it would initially appear had great looking websites did not rank for the keywords. We have taken the sites got them to rank highly if not at the top for their chosen keyword. If you would like us to do this for your business and give us a call on (020) 3137 1826 or drop us an email at saymoo@smartcowmarketing.com