Traditionally, SEO was all about gaining higher rankings for the most important keyword phrases. That was early in the game and back then, some people believed that was ALL you needed. After all if you show up number one for the best keywords then you must become a winner. But then as search engine marketing evolved, people learned that it was not enough just to have top rankings for the right key phrases, but we learned the importance of being able to provide content that compelled the visitor to take action. No one benefits if they click on your number 1 page and just leave again by clicking the back button.
More and more search engines began to reward Webmasters who created in depth, high quality content that served a useful purpose and actually satisfied the reason why the searchers initiated the search in the first place. It still amazes me when I hear people trying to decipher some kind of secret coding when Matt Cutts talks. "Hmmm, I wonder what Matt really means when he talks about quality content," they puzzle. He is simply telling you the truth. Google can recognize the context of a message through Artificial Intelligence. Write content that is written well for a human reader and you will be rewarded with some relevancy.
Let's not forget the advent of the Pay Per Click process which was a pretty big trend when it was first introduced at the time too. I remember some people saying that they would never do Pay Per Click, but it evolved into what it has become today. A well accepted form of paid advertising.
Your job as an SEO professional is to keep up to date in an ever changing environment and keep yourself apprised of current and future trends. You want to keep yourself aware of what is coming next because that way, you'll always be able to assist your customers with up to date skills and advantages regardless of the changing search landscapes.
This time around, we examine a few of the challenges that SEOs will face in the future with the growing popularity of personalization of search. Personalization is the option that people can toggle on to improve their search results based on their personal interests. With personalization turned on, the search engine can gather information about the history of your searches and as the time you use it increases, it can actually become accustomed to your searching habits so as to present information that is more important or more interesting to you personally, than to someone else.
So where does the challenge come in with SEO you ask?
The challenge is that as the popularity of personalization grows so will there likely be a diminishing effect on your ranking reports. In simple, it means that 4 people in the same household could all be taking turns using the very same computer and doing searches for the very same keyword phrase, and yet each person would typically see completely different results because of their personal use of the Internet and a growing history of different interests.
What this means is that you no longer can tell exactly what your ranking reports mean because where you rank for one person will not be the same as where you rank for the next person or the next. Thus ranking reports could very well become meaningless in time.
It should be understood that with personalization turned on, the search engine is not using a different algorithm. Instead, the algorithm is the same, but there is a shuffling of results based on the particular individuals history of usage. The search engines attempt to serve up even more relevant content to that individual based on their personal interests.
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