Anyone who keeps an eye on Google’s activities is aware, to some degree, of the sea change when it comes to ranking. Long gone are the days of keyword-stuffing, shoddy backlinks and content farms. Google’s value depends upon the relevancy of the search results it provides to its legions of advertisers, so it stands to reason that they would do everything they can to deliver the most relevant results. As such, 2015 has already seen some big changes to SEO, and there are certainly more to come.

1. The Death of Keywords?

Keywords have been the backbone of SEO ever since Google stormed onto the internet search scene. In fact, it wasn’t so long ago that many modern-day, million-dollar websites ranked at the very top of search results with practically no effort. Such days are long gone for new webmasters and marketing teams. Spammers all but took over the keyword platform, using it to make their clients’ sites appear more relevant to Google’s algorithms than they really were. Google’s Arctic updates (Panda and Penguin) represented the death knell for such techniques, and the content farms that heavily employed them have lost nearly all of their traffic and credibility. [Read more…]