SEO and UX (user experience)

Today’s SEO puts the user at the center of its activities. Customer satisfaction, delivering results tailored to their intent, and valuable content are crucial. Ultimately, it is the user who is supposed to convert. What did this look like in the past? Unfortunately, much more focus was placed on robots, while user satisfaction disappeared somewhere along the way.

SEO Practices – Today and in the Past

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing used to be a common practice. What did it involve? Placing an excessive number of the primary keyword phrase in the page content, headings, and metadata. The result? The text provided no value to the user and was not reader-friendly. Below, we present an example of text with an excessive keyword density:

Women’s sneakers are an essential part of your wardrobe! Women’s sneakers are a great addition to sporty and casual, or even more elegant, outfits. You can choose women’s sneakers in various colors and price ranges. Our store offers women’s sneakers from many brands. Choose your favorite women’s sneakers. We encourage you to explore our women’s sneaker range.

Back when Google paid attention to the number of occurrences of the primary phrase, such solutions worked. Today – absolutely not.

Today, it is important for the text to contain not only the primary keyword phrase, but also semantic phrases, related terms, and synonyms, so that it answers the user’s question in a broad context and includes information that may be useful to the person searching.

Hiding content

Another method that used to be widely used was hiding text. More precisely, this involved creating low-quality content with a very high keyword density and placing it on the page in a way that made it invisible to the user. Examples include setting the font size to 0 or publishing content on a background of the same color, such as red text on a red background. Today, such actions are a path to a Google penalty.

Cloaking

Cloaking is another unethical tactic. What does it involve? Displaying two different versions of a website – one to robots and another to the user. This tactic is very often used for websites containing prohibited content.

Link exchange systems (SWL)

A link exchange system made it possible to obtain thousands of external links quickly and achieve high positions in Google. As one might easily guess, these were low-quality links, unrelated to the subject of the website being optimized and lacking diversity. Such practices were common when only the number of links was taken into account.

Today, Google considers not only the number of links, but above all their quality. Links should come from authoritative, diverse sources related to the subject matter of the website being optimized.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO has reached a much higher level, requiring specialist knowledge and very good skills. The website must have a logically planned structure so that users can navigate it without difficulty. Internal linking and heading hierarchy are essential elements.

Optimization for Core Web Vitals metrics is important – the largest element on the page (text, graphic, or video) must load efficiently, the page should become fully interactive within a fraction of a second, and shifts of elements that do not align with the user’s intent must not occur. Image compression, URL optimization, and the implementation of ALT attributes are also important.

Responsive website version

Another element that will certainly surprise no one is a responsive or mobile version of a website. Nowadays, practically everyone accesses the internet using mobile devices – smartphones and tablets. A website must therefore display correctly not only on desktop, but also on mobile devices. The Mobile First Index algorithm indexes the mobile version of the website first.

Although SEO has changed significantly over the years, it remains a dynamic process. Changes must be monitored on an ongoing basis and the activity strategy optimized. It is therefore worth relying on specialists in this area. We recommend the 1stplace.pl team. 1stplace.pl is an e-marketing agency focused on ethical SEO aligned with the latest trends and delivering long-lasting results.