When I began doing SEO over 10 years ago it was incredibly simple to outrank the competition.
Implementing some of the basic on page optimisation factors, then build a ton of links to the site using our keyword as the anchor text and boom, it wasn’t uncommon to be able to rank for some pretty difficult keywords overnight.
As simple as that was for us to do as “SEO’s” it did involve a fair bag of tricks, mostly in the use of automated link building tools, that made it seem very complicated to anyone outside the industry.
Over the years this has changed dramatically.
With Google’s ever-changing list of algorithmic updates and the changes to local and personalised search the ways of gaming the search engines are a thing of the past and rankings are not the only key measurement we need to look at as SEO’s anymore.
It takes a significant amount of time and effort to manually accomplish many of the tasks we used to do with software, such as link building.
This great infographic by Niel Patel highlights many of the ways that SEO has changed over the years.
