About the Author
Corey is the owner and President/CEO of Voltage. He has spent 18 years working in strategic and leadership roles focused on growing national and local client brands with award-winning, ROI-generating digital strategies. He's a recent recipient of the KCDMA 2019 Marketer of the Year award.
I often mention that the only constant in SEO is change. That’s never been more true with the emergence of AI, upcoming changes to cookies and privacy, and the the amount of volatility that we see in organic search results.
The great news I’m here to share is that in my nearly two decades doing SEO, there are a lot of things that haven’t changed. Maybe levers need to be pulled or dials turned up or down, but at the same time, the three core categories of SEO of technical, on-page, and external/off-page are still important.
I can also point to things within each that were important in 2004 are still important in 2024 (yikes, I’m old).
In the technical layer, it starts with having a site with pages that can be found and indexed. That’s step one. But, beyond that, anything that relates to a good user experience including page load times and having clean code was also important back in the day and still is now.
In the on-page category, you need to focus on your content and the context of it. That means pages and sections that have topical relevance. You’re telling your site visitors what you’re about and engaging with them in a meaningful way. That also includes the context you build with search engines who are machine learning engines that want to categorize data and information utilizing their algorithms.
When it comes to external or off-page factors, we’re still focused on links and brand mentions by third parties (and the debatable “social signals). Those provide external validation or “votes” for the authority status of our content.
Yes, I know that Google has come up with new phrases and has emphasized different things over the years. However, we’re fundamentally still seeing a lot of the same best practices and strategic aspects we always have in SEO with new things layered in or dialed up/down in importance. Have great content that engages users, make sure it is well organized, and we can win over both our target audiences and the search engines.
Check out my full article on 8 aspects of sustainable SEO strategy on Search Engine Land.