Forget About Keywords; Content and User Experience Are The New SEO

When you study online marketing in college, search engine optimization is typically part of the curriculum. Studying SEO alone, even as part of a two-year program, will leave you with outdated tactics in your arsenal. Often, the management at SEO and digital marketing firms isn't up-to-date with the latest SEO news; you can tell by their websites.

Keywords are pretty much a thing of the past. Google uses latent semantic indexing now to understand content on a web page. Before, Google would look at your keywords, such as men’s shoes, and then make sure you repeated the term a couple of times for every hundred words of text, to determine if your content is relevant to someone searching for men’s shoes. SEO professionals would specialize in content for search engines. People didn’t want to read content where the same phrase kept repeating. LSI understands contextually related terms so Google understands when you say guy’s daytime footwear, you mean men’s shoes. You can use related words sprinkled throughout your content, not necessarily together, so it reads naturally.

Google also understands intent. Even if you keyword stuff your content with buy auto insurance to match a search query, Google may still return buying guides since many people are usually researching car insurance before deciding on a company.

The user experience is important now, but it wasn't when many SEO experts started learning how to optimize for search engines. Optimizing for fast load speeds and responsive designs are a must now in the SEO industry.

It's important to keep up with changes in the SEO industry on a weekly basis. Even though no one knows Google's algorithm for returning search results, we do know that they want to provide searchers with the best results. We also know Google gives content, not keywords, the greatest weight in their algorithm. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/d358f9/writingabachelorsdegreeabout_seo/.