By Jake Hugo
Website owners started making use of SEO for improving website traffic in the 1990s. The owners of the sites had to submit the URL of a page to the desired search engines. These search engines would then send a crawler to crawl the intended page. The links on the pages are extracted information indexed on the page. The crawler had to download the page it’s working on and archiving it in the search engine’s server. Search engines existing those times immensely suffered from keyword stuffing. Websites owners were trying to gain more rank in search results. Therefore, the overused keywords get picked by searched engines and the sites top in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
When the search engines discovered this dubious methods used by web owners, adjustments were made to their algorithms and several companies were penalized by suffering immediate ban. Over the years, the algorithm of search engines has been reviewed to prevent spam, misuse of keywords and irrelevant links. These revisions had huge impacts on websites and most companies as many lost their traffic and other got banned for fierce misuse of keywords by over stuffing. The quality of the ability of search engines to spot keyword misuse has immensely improved. Consequently, web owners have been following the guidelines laid down by search engines. However, there are some sites that manage to evade being spotted tampering with keyword optimization. These sites adhere to part of the guidelines provided and ignore the others. With passage of time, these sites are discovered as the search engines effectively analyze the traffic of each site. This is why it is best to always appropriately gain traffic so as to avoid sudden loss of traffic and risk being banned.
Improvements in keyword use
- Keywords used to be absolutely exact matches of search queries by spelling. The spelling had to perfectly match for the keyword to be activated. These days that is no longer the case. The intent of the queries are understood and used to match keywords that fit the wide meaning of the queries. The search engines have improved in precision and are able to match queries and keywords based on context.
- Keywords are now not only matched through the input of typed search queries but as well as voice inputs. Various factors are out into consideration when searching for an appropriate keyword match. The mood, accent and location of the user is put into consideration. Interestingly, the sounds heard in the background of the voice input such as voice of other people and basic background noise are considered.
Conclusion
Attempts have obviously been made to override the ranks of search engines’ search results. This has been prevented by the use of a wide resource of defense techniques. These defense mechanisms are able to restrict tampering and illegal access to automatically change the ranking of sites in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Sistrix could be used by website owners to ensure the appropriate optimization of keywords. The position of keywords in content really does matter.
