How up-to-date does your SEO knowledge need to be?
I frequently talk to people that aren’t convinced that they need to keep their SEO knowledge up-to-date. “Old whitehat knowledge works just fine!” is what they say. And in some cases I think they have a point. Most SEOs don’t need to read all the SEO news everyday. But what changes do you need to check on a regular basis?
Two years ago
If the last time you read SEO blogs or Google press releases was one or two years ago you can still know enough to get good rankings. Not that much has changed in the algorithms for normal websites. The most important changes have been made in spam detection, so optimized whitehat sites shouldn’t be effected that much. But is this entirely the case?
The last two years search engines got better at crawling websites. So if you still obide by the strict crawlability rules of two years ago your website will be perfectly indexed. If you used normal text in the website with extra focus (with repeats, in urls, in titles, in headers and other important places) on the desired search term, not that much has changed either. Placing extra focus on your most important pages with a good internal navigation was as true back then as it is now. Two years ago search engines had already placed more importance on relevant links compared to irrelevant links, but they just got better at determining relevance. So what did change?
- Two years ago search engines had just begun to include time as a factor in ranking and that factor has gotten more important. Many new authority factors make use of time in their calculation. If you’re still used to old SEO, you will need to do alot of reading to grasp how this influences everything.
- Providing robots with extra information how to index and show your website has changed much since then, even during the last couple of months. Google webmaster central, <meta name=”robots” value=”noodp” />, 301 redirects and rel=”nofollow” are just a few changes that improve your communication with the search engines. How would you know this when you have been out of the SEO loop for a while?
- Search engines have gotten better and better at tweaking the search results for specific searchers. Country, language, device accessibility and content type targeting have all dramatically improved during the last two years. Most search engines are now even including personal history and other personal characteristics in their ranking alorithm.
How do I rank in the UK in stead of the US? How do I rank in Google maps or mobile? How does someones search history effect my ranking? These are all plausible questions for someone that doesn’t read much SEO news. - Many new search types have been launched during the last two years. Video, blog search, articles, maps, mobile, code, news, desktop and much more new types of search results have arizen since then. Even a seasoned SEO doesn’t know how to optimize for all of them, but they at least know they exist and they remember where they can find more information when they need it. And that is the most important thing you need to keep up to date.
There are probably many more important changes that I neglected to mention, but for someone that has been out of the loop for some time the specifics aren’t that important. But where do you get the information when you need it?! Someone that was an expert two years ago, may be a layman on all the new aspects. Who do you trust and on what topic? The search landscape constantly changes.
The most important thing you need to keep up-to-date is your network of experts and sources. Without it you have no way to really keep up-to-date SEO knowledge.