Long-Term Perspective in SEO

When you read the news and opinions of the experts in the preceding
section, you’ll find very few instances of exaggerated, hyperbolic claims
that some new policy or algorithmic change is going to turn SEO on its
head or somehow drastically alter the way we do business in the industry.
In the history of SEO, tactics frequently change, but strategy rarely does.
In other words, the specific techniques you implement will evolve, but the
goal is always—and probably always will be—to increase the number of
qualified visitors to your site. Here are some additional examples:
The tactic may have changed from directory submission to linkbait,
but the strategy is still focused on accruing new links.

The tactic may have changed from repeated site submission to XML
sitemap generation and RSS pings, but the strategy remains getting
your site’s changes crawled as quickly as possible.



NOTE When you read about a new earth-shattering change that’s going
to fundamentally change (or better yet, kill) SEO, chances are the
columnist or blogger is up against a deadline and has a word count
quota to fill. Read it with caution. When you read a story about a policy
or algorithm change with clear, calm direction about how (or whether) it
will affect you and how you should adjust, keep reading.

SEO strategies infographic.

In the last several years, plenty of changes occurred that promised to
upset the SEO cart but never did. Depending on how long you’ve watched
the space, the following list will either make you laugh or scratch your head
in confusion. Either you remember these events, or you can’t imagine they
ever happened.

Google adds paid ads in the right margin of the results page.
This threatened the SERP as we knew it, and many rang the death
knell of SEO because once you can buy your way into the results,
what need does anyone have for organic?

Google adds premium paid advertisements above organic
results. Even worse! Now the mixture of paid and natural results in
the same column will water down the algorithm’s reputation and
Google will lose all credibility. Right? Wrong.
Google adds Froogle (shopping) results between paid and
natural results. “Froogle?” Are you serious? It was the name
Google gave its shopping engine (now simply called “Google
Products”) and when Google first added shopping results (with
pictures, no less), Google was pronounced dead (again) for
abandoning its spartan design.
Yahoo! uses Google to supplement its natural search results.
Realizing that search demand was larger than its ability to serve all
its queries accurately, Yahoo! once outsourced some of its SERP
processing to Google.
Yahoo! stops using Google to supplement its natural search
results. Eventually Yahoo! stopped doing this when it bought Inktomi
and started showing its “own” results.
Google changes from its monthly Google Dance to the
“Everflux“ model. Long ago, Google recalibrated its index monthly,
and the SERPs were relatively static until the next month’s change.
Google adds local and one box results of every imaginable
flavor. Anything that sends organic results further down the page
causes an uproar. In the case of local and “one box” results, smart
SEOs looked at changes as an opportunity to expand their
presence.

Google inserts “see also” results in the middle of organic
results. How dare Google try to direct users away from a query that I
worked so hard to rank for? What most SEOs didn’t understand was
that mathematical equilibrium predicts that you’ll gain roughly the
same number of visits as you’ll lose when “related searches” are
integrated into SERPs.
This list is meant to make you feel neither old nor young, neither green
nor experienced. Its goal is simply to show you that over time, we’ve seen
a large number of changes, each of which was going to shake things up
significantly, and none of which really did. The next time you read about
how “SEO is dead” due to the next big technology or site du jour,
remember that all the preceding things were going to fundamentally
transform SEO. But despite the predictions, life went on, and SEO didn’t
die. Not once.

SEO will be around as long as search engines are around. Search
engines (although probably not in their modern form) will be around as long
as people look for information. As discussed earlier, the tactics will
change, but the strategy will remain the same: Create your content, get it
crawled and indexed, encourage the clickthrough, and make the sale.