The internet as we know it actually hasn’t been around all that long. It’s easy to forget that just 10 or 15 years ago going online required longer download/upload times, frequent system crashes, and sites that featured mostly text instead of streaming. Not to mention that mobile web browsing was practically non-existent.

Today, things are a lot different. So the way businesses attract new online customers needs to be different, too. Today, engagement with site visitors is way more important than stuffing your website and pages with SEO to attract more people.

Content over Keywords

Remember early webpages that featured keywords stuffed into nook and cranny so they would be more attractive to search engine algorithms? Back in the early 2000s, the only way to get people to land on your site was to have the best keywords in all the right places.

Today, the algorithms that power Google, Bing, YouTube, Baidu, and other powerful global search engines have adapted to the times. Their creators realize that internet users don’t want to land on pages that are all but unreadable because they are “SEO stuffed”. Instead, algorithm coders understand that people want high-quality content that they can genuinely engage with in meaningful ways. So they have adapted their search engines to reflect these preferences.

Future of SEO

SEO is still important. It’s just not as important as engagement with content people actually want. Successful web page designers today value quality over quantity. They consider how people will interact with their websites once they land there rather than simply trying to attract as many people as possible with SEO stuffing and other outdated techniques.

There’s still a place for SEO, keywords, and other traffic tools. But all these things need to take a backseat to content and engagement in today’s online superhighway.