Search Engines tend to hide their secrets as much as they can, and many users may not be aware of the vast evolution Search Engines have already gone through. They have changed quite a bit since their humble beginnings, and are going to keep evolving to bring the most relevant results to searchers.
Search Engines began with simple keyword matching. Results were only returned if they exactly matched the keywords given, somewhere in the document.
Soon, Search Engines learned that positioning of keywords in documents influences relevancy. And then that certain pages are more ‘important’. This importance is determined by many factors such as inbound links and the amount of searchers that have previously clicked on certain pages.
The future is personalisation. Search Engines are increasingly collecting information to learn more about searcher behaviour. Although they won’t reveal their strategies publicly, with voice search, we can expect further personalisation in the future, with results reflecting a lot more about the searcher. The focus will go from relevance to recommendation, with Search Engines doing more to reflect the true interests of searchers.
The constant evolution of Search Engines is just one of the many reasons it is important to have an ongoing SEO campaign, and to keep up-to-date with everything that’s going on.
So hold on, it’s potentially a bumpy ride to SEO success…
