In the earliest days of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a big part of the challenge was displaying the patience necessary to chart progress, as it could be weeks or months between the time that changes were made to a website and when those changes were noticed by search engines’ spiders.
As a result of that schedule, there wasn’t a particular focus on making day-to-day SEO-oriented modifications to a site, as they could go unnoticed for large stretches of time. To keep everything in perspective, we were all pretty amazed with the fact that search engines were actually capable of indexing the world’s websites, we were not nitpicking the fact that the cycle to circle back to each site took weeks or months.
OMG, how times have changed! The newer iterations of the search engine algorithms place a supreme emphasis on the inclusion of fresh content. Not only that, but they are practically able to update their search indexes in a real-time manner. Add a new post to your blog in the morning and the post will more than likely be indexed by that afternoon. (This assumes the blog is set up correctly and the post is tagged properly.) Updating your Twitter stream? Your tweets may appear in Google near instantaneously for a related keyword search.
Here’s a link from early June to Google's official blog that explains their Caffeine update, sheds light on where SEO is heading and as a result what search marketers need to be thinking about.
The anatomy of search engine results pages continues to evolve. One certainty is that stagnant websites will be left in the dust by ones that embrace the fluid nature of content, be it words, images or video, and demonstrate a commitment to consistently producing new and relevant information.
