20 Things I Learned From 20 Years of Working in the SEO Industry

A seasoned SEO professional shares 20 of the most important lessons she has learned from two decades of experience in the industry.

Being an SEO professional has its challenges and its rewards.

After working in the SEO industry for more than 20 years, I have come to learn a lot about myself and the peculiarities that come with optimizing websites.

I started my career in 2000 optimizing my pet supply website for search engines Excite and Lycos.

I learned from Microsoft’s bCentral for Business helpful tips and search engine submission.

My career took a turn when I jumped from the pet industry to the SEO industry working for an agency.

Since then I have managed SEO as a consultant and in-house for startups, medium, and enterprise organizations.

I now manage SEO for one of the largest and well-known companies in the technology world and throughout my years, I have come to learn a lot.

Now that I have reached my 20-year mark, I felt it was perfect timing to share the 20 most important lessons I have learned working in SEO as the landscape of search engine optimization has drastically made twists and turns.

With that has come lessons from 20 years of working on many different types of websites and organizations.

1. Things Change

In the early years of SEO, optimizing a website was less of a challenge than what SEO professionals face today.

You could pick a few keywords to work into a website’s content, in the title, description, and keyword meta tag.

They would submit the website to search engines and various directories to find the site would drive traffic and business would pick up.

There were no keyword tools or analytics, but there also wasn’t much competition.

Now there are more complex algorithms that filter out spam and black hat SEO tactics.

There is personalization, localization, machine learning, neural matching, RankBrain, and E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).

We have insights into keyword data, complex data-driven environments, analytics, and data science that drive the strategies we choose to make for optimization.

SEO has become a complex and more challenging world that is ever evolving.

Read more: searchenginejournal