How search engines are changing the digital landscape for websites

The world evolves fast, and the digital landscape is at the cutting edge of that evolution. Artificial intelligence has begun a foray into the search engine world and is changing the dynamics of the environment. In this article, we will look at how things have changed over recent years so that you can understand what you should be doing to develop your website in the current search landscape. 

The evolution of search engines

Let's start with a bit of context and history to see how marked the shift is in how Google and other search engines are beginning to operate.

When Google first started, it was enough to put keywords in the titles of your articles and pages and incorporate them into meta-tags and your courier. That enabled Google to label your website as about a specific topic. When people search for things online, they use keywords, and if Google found those keywords within the various elements of your webpage, they presented it to the users as relevant. In addition, Google counted the number of links pointing toward a website to get an idea of how reliable that website was.

As can be the way of the world, people manipulated search results by building artificial links and cramming as many keywords as possible into web pages.

Over the years, Google has brought in various algorithm changes to try and provide the best, most reliable search results. That has meant penalizing sites with links from spammy networks, penalizing sites full of adverts, and downranking websites with thin content with little value. So how does Google now look at range and websites as a whole?

A learning search engine

Google is at the cutting edge of search engines. The digital giant accounts for around 90% of search traffic, and it's where everyone wants to be. Google now does a much better job of understanding what a page is about. Where pronouns and the various aspects of language used to be ignored, Google now uses them to understand the context of the language on websites and in search queries.

Google assesses entities and looks at what makes the web comprehend topics. According to the B2B Inbound Marketing Agency JumpFactor, The new natural language processing algorithm can tell the difference between apple the fruit and apple computer with very little information. The new algorithm knows that if you are searching for "Is my wife cheating?", it's appropriate to provide different search results depending on the user the question.

In the example above, the user could be asking casually what are the kinds of signs that would show that his wife is being unfaithful. The search query may offer me a local private detective to determine if my wife is straying. There could also be other meanings behind the search intent for that search query, so Google has a very complex job of understanding what information to present.

Google is using massive data to hone the results to better match search intent. The amount of information that Google has through Google Analytics is phenomenal. Most websites now have Google Analytics installed. The algorithm's components look at website bounce rates, the number of pages visited, the duration of visits, and so forth. Google develops a picture of what good-performing websites look like and can then incorporate the elements that make up those websites as ranking factors. Google also has human raters that feed into the algorithm by providing general data on what is good and what is not. The algorithm has become a learning machine that can understand language, just like you and I.

The future and what it means to your website

What you have to do with your website now is produce content that matches the search query intent, is grammatically excellent, and provides visitors with a path toward more solutions. It's not enough these days just to write decent content; you need to understand the language of your topic so that the page is clearly relevant.

For example, search optimization is made up of several different concepts. To understand what the topic really is requires that you know all of the languages that make up the topic, and one way to do that is to assess what Google is currently ranking in the top 200 search results and look at co-occurring citations, language counts and the various meaning that is incorporated in the whole body of data.

When you have this information, you may discover that search engine optimization is about search engines and optimization. You, therefore, have two core aspects to the one term. There will be language around improving search results and language around search engines. There will be a language familiar to the topic, such as bounce rates, visitors, and user experience, and a speech about one or the other subtopic.

For example, search engines have massive data services, work through browsers, and include MSN, Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Google. Optimization is about improving efficiency, analysis, output graph line, etc. You need to work out what the language is so that you can incorporate it into your content and into your supporting pages.

Search engine optimization in the digital landscape has become more complex and accessible. You can produce outstanding content if you are willing to do the data analysis. Anyone could stuff keywords into a page and put together 500 words of copy.

It takes more work to produce excellent quality copy that provides solutions and has the correct language to fire the relevance and quality signals in the Google algorithm. It's a time when you need to be thinking about your website visitor experience and becoming a data analyst alongside being a quality copywriter.