As an SEO, we always have to keep one eye on the customer and one eye on the algorithm. While doing things for the customer makes perfect sense, we still have to do them in the right way so as to make our work available to the search engines and hopefully earn decent rankings.
If you’re not keeping up with the constantly changing algorithms, you’ll miss some important updates. For example, if you’re only focused on building an experience for your visitors, you generally don’t care much about whether Google can read your CSS or Javascript, or if your entire site is HTTPS secure. However, Google does care about those things now, so you need to as well.
But what matters more than today’s algorithms is the algorithms of tomorrow.
[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]A good SEO always tries to stay one step ahead of Google[/inlinetweet]. That’s not to say that there won’t often be surprises along the way, but so long as we have a good understanding of where the algorithms are going, we can make sure to prep our sites to be there, ready and waiting, by the time the algorithms catch up.
Panda? Penguin? Hummingbird? Those algorithms and updates mattered a great deal to many people. Especially those who were negatively impacted by them. But while we have to understand how they work and why, those algorithms mean a lot less to those who were forward thinking enough to avoid doing the very types of things that those algorithms penalized.
We need to stay current but always look ahead at what’s coming. Only by doing both can you ensure to maintain a site that will be relevant both today and tomorrow.