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In the first part of the THREE Part SEO series post I spoke about the common SEO mistakes SEO and non-SEO specialists have to watch out for. Today, in the second part of the SEO series post, I will be talking about another very important aspect which affects SEO rankings of websites over search engines; changes occuring within various search engines and its impact on SEO rankings of websites. Today, competition among various search engines have increased drastically and every search engine wants to occupy the top spot. Currently, this spot is occupied by Google: “the search engine mother”. The main aim of every search engine is to provide top notch user experience and satisfaction. In order to do so, changes must occur within these search engines and they must keep on updating themselves to provide better results for the users. In this post I will be discussing the top 5 search engine changes to watch out for.

ALGORITHMIC IMPORTANCE

Algorithms form the foundation of search engines and algorithmic changes occur very frequently. Google goes through regular changes in its algorithms in order to regulate website rankings and to choose the best content to display on its first page.  For Example: Brand Core Algorithmic update has been a very important algorithmic update within Google focusing on quality more than quantity.  The update gives more importance to H1 tags over Title tags as the basis of selection of website rankings. The search engine Bing has also given algorithms high importance; this can be seen through its recent strategy of collaborating with Microsoft in order to design a bot. This “bot” will help Bing advertisers with their ad campaigns by gaining access to a virtual account manager and managing their accounts in an efficient way. Further, with a view of improving and making only the best pages with great content come up on the first page, a lot of focus is given on the importance of keywords. Keyword stuffing and using irrelevant keywords are some common malpractices with respect to keywords, and search engine algorithms are designed to catch these malpractices and ranking websites accordingly. It is very important here to understand that the search engine needs to know or have a basic idea of what your content or your website is all about.  However, loading it with keywords is not going to be of any help, it will only lower your website rankings.

MOBILE PHONE CHANGES

Mobile Phones are a focal point of technological development. Today, Majority of surfing and searching is done via Mobile Phones, making it very crucial for search engines to provide for an extremely friendly and easy interface with respect to mobile phones. Such is the importance of mobile phones, that, major search engines like Google rank websites on the basis of their performance over mobile phone interface rather than laptop interface. It doesn’t stop here; Google has also recently updated its speed in order to provide faster results over the mobile interface. This step was taken to provide a better user experience and was primarily  focused on improving page speed of slow pages.  Hence, SEO Specialists have to be extremely aware of creating content which is mobile friendly.  Another notable feature with respect to mobile phones is the introduction of AMP pages (Accelerated Mobile Pages) by many search engines.  How is this an important feature? Search engines are going to follow a process called mobile indexing,  wherein,  mobile friendly pages will be given preference over regular website pages.The main aim of search engines here  is to create an extremely speedy and easy mobile interface experience for their users and also improving the experience in each and every way possible. A lot of attention is also given to the design, responsiveness, image and content links with respect to mobile phones.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial Intelligence is one of the most futuristic changes to watch out for and is also being used in the present. AI makes the whole search engine experience more customised and personalised for the user.  When you search something on a search engine or want to find information about something you get a bunch of infinite results. These results are generic and based on world-wide basis. However, with the help of AI the generated results become extremely customised and user related. For example: You type “best law colleges” on a search engine; the results would be a list of all the best law colleges worldwide. However, when AI is used for SEO and you type the same thing, your results would be slightly different. With the help of AI, the search engine will provide you with the best law colleges as per your geographical locations. This makes the job of SEO specialists a bit difficult as they have to put forth their best foot forward  because  with the use of AI, search engines only select the best content and rank them accordingly. Another change seen within search engines due to the use of AI is the solving of complex questions.  Let’s Say, you want to know the name and location of the tunnel where the very first scene of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE –FALLOUT was shot, how will you know this? Very simple, just type the question on the search engine and with the help of AI it will give you not only the exact name and location of the tunnel but also other specific locations seen within the movie and also other locations of the previous MI movies ! This is the magic of artificial intelligence. It  eases the performance of search engines  and helps them improve and solve even the most complicated problems and questions. This was  not possible before the use of AI. AI also helps SEO specialists in making their content unique and helping them increase their search engine rankings. There are many tools based on AI like keyword generating tools, grammar correcting tools, headline analysing tools which reduce the burden of small tasks and help SEO specialists be more creative and increase their rankings. Chat Bot is another very cool and interesting feature of Artificial Intelligence. Remember the chat pop ups that appear on certain websites wherein you can chat with a customer executive at any time and they assist you in understanding their websites ? Yes, those same customer executives are not humans but a form of Artificial Intelligence. These are chat bots which are created in order for the website to be unique and in turn increase its rankings over search engines. AI should be considered as an extremely powerful change within search engine.

HUMAN-CENTRIC APPROACH

Gone are the days of SEO being technical and robot- centric. Today, and in the near future the main aim of Search engines will be to be more human centric and give importance to user experience. What do the users want? How can they be understood better? How can their problems be solved? How can user satisfaction increase? These are the questions which every search engine will ask itself while improving its workings. Better optimization of images, better user interface, good value content, improved search results, experimentation with content and being consumer focused will be some of the main aims of Search engines.

BLOCK CHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Block chain technology can be very complicated to understand. I am going to try and simplify it for you. Block chain technology is nothing but a kind of technology that makes economic transactions extremely easy, transparent and uncomplicated. It is the mastermind behind various crypto currencies, the most famous one being BITCOIN. So when bitcoins are used for transactions over the internet, block chain technology is used, which makes these transactions extremely closed and transparent and also protected from online frauds. Further, block chain also acts as a digital ledger and keeps a record of all the transactions made using this technology and also updates and changes in the transactions. All the transactions are recorded digitally so the company or individual knows about it and any changes made within these transactions are also noted, this is an extremely good feature of this technology as one exactly knows where and when and how much amount has been transacted. Now, how does this technology help  search engines? Another complicated process. A block chain based search engine can be extremely  unique and a search engine of the future. Today, most of the search engines face one common criticism, lack of privacy.  It is very easy for search engines to share a user’s personal information and hack their privacy.  However, if there are search engines which use block chain technology or if existing search engines started using this technology then privacy will be assured. With the help of crypto technology a very important change within search engines will be making user experience extremely customised and not sharing user information, further, it will also block out unnecessary ads and information as seen in other search engines making it more personalised. Nebulas Global Block chain search engine is one such search engine that uses block chain technology in its workings.  It uses block chain technology for ranking and indexing its data, apps and even smart contracts. Nebulas has a very different ranking system as compared to other search engines.  It has an open source core ranking algorithm and uses on chain transaction records for ranking smart contracts, applications. This maintains the privacy of the user.

I hope this post has helped you gain all the information you need about the various search engine changes to watch out. In the final part of the THREE part SEO series post, I will be discussing the Black Hat and White Hat SEO Techniques in a completely new perspective.

ABOUT THE BLOGGER

Kamakshi Ray is a 21 year old Sociology Student who is currently in her final year of graduation. She is an avid reader and an extremely passionate writer. Currently, she is working as a social media intern for Infozzle Software Solutions where she writes about various topics related to SEO, Web Design, E-commerce, etc. and manages the company’s social media profiles on Linkedin and Facebook.