In the good old days, keyword stuffing, links, and spam were a great way to get your site listed in the search engines and the search engines loved these kinds of sites. It became an industry with all sorts of variations to a theme. Nowadays, however, those tactics aren’t the goldmine in SEO like they used to be.

Nowadays you’ve got to work for your rankings. You just can’t depend on backlinking or keywords anymore. You have to have your site mobile friendly, update quality content, have social media presence and interaction, email lists, advertising, proper design, page speed, accessibility, knowledge graph, local SEO, globalization and more.
You’ve got to incorporate all these options and it calls for lots of work and maintenance. Not like the old days where you could slap up a website with some bells and whistles, keywords and keyphrases, backlinking and let it ride.

Not any more.

Now you have to expand with promotion via social networking. Not just Facebook either but a presence on just about all the social networks and the small but growing ones. Of course Google wants you to use as many of their venues as possible and that helps your rankings as well, and they supply lots of free tools for webmasters and digital marketers.

Your site had better be mobile friendly as mobile computing is expanding at alarming speeds. So is voice search. Those two alone are the future of computer interaction as people are shying away from traditional laptops and desktops. All your data has to be properly structured as well. You have to make your site easy to access, load fast, easy to navigate, have lots of valid and relevant backlinks, copywriting that is nothing short of fluid and superb, videos and pictures well tagged and described and all of that with your location prominently mentioned in every post, email, ad, and whatever, especially with your social media marketing.

It’s becoming a 24 hour job to operate a website nowadays if you want to rise up to the top positions on Google. Professionals who do SEO are finding it much more frustrating and time consuming but only these professionals get the super top results. They have to do 5 times the amount of website analysis they did just a year ago and even then, Google’s updates and the rise of other trends can throw these experts off guard.