Birthday celebrations for SEO Training and a peek at what has changed in SEO over the last two years

October 13th 2009 saw the launch of SEO training, where Joe used his prior five years agency and in-house search engine optimisation (SEO) experience to provide SEO courses for both beginners and advanced levels to ‘do-it-yourself’.

The Rise in SEO Popularity

In 2011 Google’s UK market share rose to a high of 92% (Hitwise) and as much as 80% of this is believed to be in preference of SEO. This combined with SEO becoming more transparent and less of a ‘voodoo black art’ has seen online businesses investing more of their online marketing budget and energy into it.

SEO requires patience for the bigger longer term sustainable rewards and as a consequence has seen many companies develop SEO in-house to allow greater control of their websites.

Times they are a-Changin'

They certainly are, just like Bob Dylan famously sang. And over the last couple of years we have perhaps seen as much SEO change as the previous five combined. It’s not that things have got more technical or difficult but Google has got smarter about which sites it feels are credible and which it should reward.

Links from external websites are still as important as ever but Google really wants to feel you truly ‘earned’ them through the production of useful and interesting content – this way you build up search engine trust that lasts.

Earlier this year, Google’s Panda algorithm update devalued site’s with duplicate or ‘thin’ content. Meaning links from lower quality sites such as article syndication passed less value. And when you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. Did you really earn the link? Or was it always going to come your way (along with 1000s of others that day). Think unique quality content that adds value to your industry and you will earn search engine respect and rankings. And a whole heap of Google love.

The Future of SEO

SEO continues to be a long term strategy and with long term rewards. Think really big, in fact think massive rewards if you get it right! So it’s important to stick at it and gain as much momentum in the coming weeks, months and years as possible. It’s not a onetime event.

Right now, you can bet many of your competitors are cutting corners and chasing Google’s current algorithm where only some of their tactics still work. And not truly providing what Google really wants – awesome content that proves you are a credible leader in your industry.

The top search engines are getting better at working out what truly is quality, so now is a great time to add even more value in the content on your website.