People have been optimizing their websites for search engines for over 18 years, and SEO in Fremont and around the country has changed in that time, as all technology has. Your Fremont business may have seen many SEO changes as the internet grew and evolved into what it is today, though you may not have realized exactly what it was that changed.

One might wonder why search engines change so much, and the answer is that because technology and our understanding of how it works have changed. When search engines were first created, their results were shown in alphabetical order. Because of this, some businesses chose to use a name with an A (or two, or three) at the beginning, in order to show up first. As time went on, search engines began to add weight in other areas to determine which results to display first. The largest factor in today’s lists is relevance – how closely the result relates to the word or phrase inserted into the search engine.

When relevance first began to be a factor, businesses would often keyword-stuff – adding keywords to their pages whether they fit properly or not, or in long lists of words at the bottom of the page. This method is no longer of any use, and actually backfires, resulting in a lower ranking for pages who attempt this.

The current SEO rankings look for originality. Information that is unique and useful will rank higher than generic content, and even more so if the generic content is duplicated elsewhere on the internet.

Google has added two new algorithms in the last few years, known as Penguin and Panda. Penguin’s function was to filter out spam sites from the results, and new updates check the removed sites to discover whether the offending links or spam content is still there. When it is gone, the sites are re-indexed. Panda’s function is to check for content that is written poorly and keep those out of the top results.

Because of the changes, SEO used to be simply adding keywords but has become a somewhat greater task, requiring meticulous planning and creativity. There was a time when having a bunch of sites linking to one’s site increased ranking, but because this spawned “link farms,” Google’s algorithms have changed to verify the ‘authority’ of each inbound link. Only links that carry any authority will increase rankings.

Another Google update, Pigeon, changed things to make location a part of its ranking for certain searches. Local searches became more truly local and high-quality sites began to be shown first to searchers.

There have been other changes over the last ten years, also, including how the result pages look, Google’s Knowledge Graph, and the rise of mobile-friendly weighting. The end result of all these changes, however, is simply that relevant, quality content is the best way to ensure your Fremont business’s SEO in Fremont efforts will be rewarded.