Never Worry About An Update Again: How To Future Proof Your SEO

Search engine optimization has been around since the beginning of the inetrnet. Like many techniques, it started simple with ideas, but the advance of new algoithms started to put the focus less on the web master creating the pages and more on how to use people viewing pages to do quality control. This worked for a while, but it’s still not perfect since it leaves new, but highly useful pages unnoticed for long periods of time.

People tend to think of SEO as a trick that is used in order to get your page to rank, but it really isn’t. What it is instead is a way of guiding web developers and business owners on how to create the best, most useful, most efficient websites. That’s why if you’re looking to future proof your SEO, the trick is knowing what makes a good website. Here are some tips.

[box type=”spacer”]Site Architecture[/box]

When creating a new website, the very first thing you want to take into account is how the site itself is built. That means that little things like your meta tags have to be in order so that web crawler bots from the search engines can read them and know exactly what it is that you do. This doesn’t just help the crawler bots know what to look for, it helps them index your page the way you want it indexed, so the people who are likely to be customers or clients arrive instead of people searching for an unrelated topic.

Similarly, it’s important to make sure that your site is efficiently set up, with pages in the proper directories, links that make site navigation intuitive, and a sitemap that can lay all of that out. Web crawler bots will index every individual page you have eventually, but they find those pages by following links, one to another, in a logical progression. If your page isn’t well built, they will get lost and not read pages that might be important. This is by design: if they can’t find a page easily, your human visitors can’t either, so make sure your pages are accessible.

[box type=”spacer”]Content is King[/box]

The trend in search engine algorithms, as they get more and more sophisticated, is to stop looking for clues as to what’s written and simply being able to read what is written. Right now, they’re not there yet, but they will be soon, which is why content is so important, and the rules for writing good SEO articles are not bad rules for providing quality information either.

Make sure that you write things that are on topic. The requirement to have 3-5% of your article be the keywords that you’re targeting is a good rule of thumb to make sure that you’re discussing the thing that you want to talk about. It helps keep your writing on track and make the article itself relevant to potential readers. Similarly, restricting the length of copy addresses that most people don’t want to read books online. They want simple answers to questions.

Another aspect of content that will keep your SEO future proof: keep updating. Old information can be useful if it goes viral and gets a lot of backlinks, but if you want your actual site to rank well, you have to constantly be adding new content. Again, this helps you provide a valuable service to your customers, by always having new knowledge for them to take in, it gives them a reason to keep coming back to your site and also gives bloggers a good reason to link to you.

The job of a search engine is to provide a user with the most useful websites for a given query. If you want to make sure that you don’t have to worry about your SEO for as long as there are search engines, stop thinking of it as some sort of magical formula and focus instead on providing the most useful website you can for your potential customers.

Written by Andrew Scherer. SEO and proprietor for Marketer’s Center, real link building services for real SEOs.