3 changes in the SEO industry which small businesses need to be aware of

To say that the SEO industry has turned on its head over recent years would be a gross understatement. In fact, one only has to cast their eye over Google’s balance sheet to see how huge this internet search engine has really become.

However, unless you are a big company who has the big bucks to throw at hiring experts, SEO can be something of a minefield. What works today, certainly isn’t guaranteed to work tomorrow, and today’s article is all about looking at some of these areas in-detail.

Change #1 – Lots of pages covering similar topics

Let’s start with one of the biggest changes that the SEO industry has had to come to terms with over recent times. If we turned back the clock a few years, one of the most common practices was to create lots of different pages that covered very similar topics. For example, you might create a page to cover “blue widgets”, and one to cover “widgets that are blue”. This was all related to the manner in which Google worked.

Well, they’ve now become a lot smarter and understand user intent a lot more. It means that they will serve the same results for such queries, meaning that webmasters can focus on placing more emphasis on quality pages, rather than the quantity they are creating. Particularly as it is so easy to build a website with Web Eden and create these pages on the fly, this is a really important note to consider.

Change #2 – Keyword rich alt tags

Another common tactic was to stuff alt tags with as many keywords as you desired for your page. Again, this worked a treat a few years ago, but now it is likely to result in some sort of penalty.

The new advice is to target users with this alt text. Its primary form is to help those who cannot see images, so your alt text should describe each image accordingly.

Change #3 – Exact match anchor text

This next point relates to external links. There’s no doubt that this landscape has changed immensely over the last few years. Again, it used to be a case of quantity over quality, but following Google raising the ante by introducing manual penalties this has changed a lot over recent times.

In truth, we could write a whole whitepaper on the way in which external links have changed, but let’s just hone in on anchor text for now. Once upon a time exact match was the way forward, but nowadays this is something which is really not advisable. Sure, a small percentage of exact match links are not going to hurt, but beyond this and you risk activating a Google penalty.

This can apply from an on-site perspective as well. For example, some sites might go with a keyword heavy navigation, even when linking to their homepage. Suffice to say, it’s an unnatural way of linking, and this is exactly what Google don’t want to see.