Anyone who worked for a long time in the online business and has also pursued search engine optimization for many years knows that nothing is carved in stone. Search engines have come and gone and similar things have also been observed in ranking factors. Previously, keywords were so important that they were filled in the days of Fireball and Lycos (popular search engines before Google) in Title, Description and almost all other meta tags. And if that was not enough, the keywords were simply put in countless repetition at the end of the website – first quite open, then later in background color and finally hidden by various tricks.
If search engines gave possibilities for optimization, website owners and SEOs also found a little trick to create more advantages. So it went step by step forward and now we find ourselves in an environment where no one really knows exactly what is really important in the search engine optimization. Hundreds of factors are said to be about success or failure, and some are, of course, more important than others. But is it really so? More and more, the idea is that the search engine optimization has returned to a completely new level, and simply what has been learned in recent years no longer has the meaning that many want.
Already last week the Google web trend analysts Illyes and Müller in Tweets clarified that links are not amongst the top ranking factors. And all by itself, because there are no top ranking factors. What really matters is different with every new search. Now John Müller was asked whether keywords above the fold were important for the optimization and answered: Users do not care about keywords – content and functionality are important for them. The meaning of keywords is thus no longer as it once was. For website owners, it will be important in the future to look at the big picture. Of course, a clean optimization will not be wrong and guarantees also some advantages bring with it. But everything has to be right on the side, so the user must be enthusiastic about the content and can navigate quickly and easily on the page at any time and with every device.
