Search engines are there to help people find what they want on the internet. Search engines is, was, and always will try to deliver the best user experience by giving information that they think is relevant to what we want to discover. Search engine marketers should know how to create a compelling image of a website so search engines can see it as something useful for the masses.
Search engines have began their work for a long time. Yahoo! was one of the, if not the first, to implement taxonomies, where the search engine focused on organizing content into specific categories inside a directory. It wasn't long until Yahoo! that had a homepage that listed these categories to create a "portal" site.
When Google started its game, it came with a different approach: no portal. Google uses semantic search to understand the meanings of words that are entered using the search query. This developed into personalized search, local search, user behavior, user preferences, user favorites, and credible contents.
Despite the rapid changes that search engines do to keep up with the demands, old SEO tactics seem to never fade. Google has spent much of its time and expense to finding ways to clean up the mess it thinks the internet has under its sleeves, but information architecture and findability on the web by many platforms, the abundance of information, tagging, uses of meta data and categories, didn't change as fast.
Google could not develop new ideas faster than the sites it indexed because these sites are what made Google a search engine in the first place. Google and other search engines should still use old indexing so they can 'understand' the web as it is.
Despite that, search engines should still update their algorithms to meet the current demand of their users. This has made them smarter. By doing something over and over again means doing things better and better. That applies to people that develop search engine's algorithm. And for SEM, keeping up with these algorithm changes is crucial to create a better user engagement and website visitors.
There is one thing about SEO that can't be denied: its a game where the objective is to outsmart machines by math and tricks. But the point to do so is by "focusing on the user".
Search engines are delivering contents by value. If an information holds a big value, search engines will appreciate it.
Knowing the Competition
Many websites failed to thrive after search engine algorithm update. But when many have failed, many others survived. To survive any search engine algorithm update, a website must be built so that everyone can use. This means that a website should be accessible on all devices, by any software.
With the decline of PC sales, more and more people are going online through their mobile devices. Modern day websites should be able to adapt to any device by creating a similar user experience to what they give to normal PC users.
Competing with others on the web is by giving something others don't have. The first strategy is to analyze the closest competitors' SEO. With all the necessary data, SEM can then create compelling information by creating articles, tips and tricks, news, DIY, products, and so forth. Each and every page should be carefully written for SEO, publication and conversion.
To get to a content, people will need to pass through many aspects: website speed, website issue, server responds, website design, links, and so forth. Search engines are looking through each and every of these aspects to deliver the best relevant content from the safest and most reliable site it has that holds that information from its indexed database.
Although a website's design does not directly affect SEO, it's still something to rely on if the website wants to give a pleasant user experience by pleasing the visitors' eyes. However, the major drawback from a website's design is that the more sophisticated and eye-catchy it is, the more heavier it becomes. If a website is heavily designed, SEM should alter visitors' user experience from speed to content.
Although internet speed in average is increasing worldwide, speed is still and always be an important factor. Since more and more information is available on the web, websites are competing for a smaller and smaller portion of the users' time. To make use of the available time to the max, websites should be able to load faster than their closest competitors. (Read: Speeding Up Your Website and Improving Its Performance)
When content is what people seek, originality is what search engines want. Since duplicating and recreating content on the internet is as easy as copying and pasting, SEM should be able to give additional information that can't be found elsewhere. Although a trending article can be a clickbait strategy, when everyone else is eventually doing it, the new article for the same topic will fail to get traction. By adding more information to these articles can refresh them to a new state.
Links are what made the web. Internet users and search engines browse the internet to reach to a specific page by jumping from links to links. Links that made the web a network, should be part of the overall SEM's strategy.
Conclusion
Search engines may have changed throughout its lifetime, but old SEO strategy can still be an 'ace' to some marketers. It all depends on what information is available and the intended audience the marketer is aiming to deliver.
Algorithm updates is all about giving better user experience, making search engines a lot smarter than they were before. But when it comes to the 'SEO game', the math is to know how the website competes, and the tricks is focus on the user.