What are SEO and what will it mean for the future of the World Wide Web? I have written many articles in which I discuss this topic and you can find those articles on my website. In this article, however, I will focus on some of the more advanced basics of link building and ranking that will be important in the future.

Search engines have changed dramatically since the days when Google was first introduced. At the time, it was a simple concept. Google would index websites based on how they were indexed by other search engines and would rank them based on those rankings. Today, there are so many factors that go into ranking a web page. First, the search engines have changed dramatically and now use so many different factors in ranking web pages. The basics of SEO in 2021 should include these changes.

Back in the basics, we started with the idea that Google was the only indexing tool that mattered. It worked that way, but not for all of the major indexing tools. In order for sites to remain ranked highly in the search engines, there had to be a combination of factors that kept the web’s users interested. First, there had to be high quality content. High quality content is hard to come by today because the quality level has been lowered in order to provide more page views.

Second, there had to be keyword research and optimization on the site. Keyword research is the process of finding highly relevant keywords that are used by users in search engine searches. On a typical search engine page, the user is looking for something that is relevant to that search. A keyword must be highly relevant to that search. The keywords that are used in creating the meta tags and title tags as well as in the content of the page also play an important role. These keywords must also be written correctly.

Third, it was vital for the web page to be linked from other high quality pages. Links from non-related or low quality pages would be considered black hat, and the pages linking to them would be penalized by the search engines. This was the way black hat strategies were utilized by spamming the search engines. Google implemented these rules in 2021, making black hat strategies unacceptable. This did not stop individuals from using them, however, so now black hat is considered acceptable even though the penalty for doing so was primarily targeted at spammers.

Today, black hat practices are considered acceptable because they do not decrease page rankings, provide quality content and are linkable to other high quality websites. However, this has not stopped Google from implementing stricter rules in the future. Eventually, Google will implement its own algorithm for page ranking that is different than what currently exists on the internet. For now, white hat strategies are recommended.