It has not really changed all that much.

The only thing that has changed is Google keeps getting better and better at enforcing what they have always been saying.

For me its making sure to continue with minimizing all footprints to G's algo wrt off-page seo with hopefully finding some new techniques in 2015... also moving towards epic content marketing and link baiting/social shares... and away from methods which are time consuming and not as effective as it used to be - for me that's tiered link building, deeply spun articles for lower tiers - mostly as its really time consuming lol... Also building PBNs continues to be effective so will continue with that... but again got to be careful with those footprints....

For me, I'm spending far more time optimizing my sites from an architecture point of view. All of my sites now run on a VPS with a dedicated IP. Running on Apache+NGINX, with Google's Pagespeed module installed on 100% of sites.

I'm getting 200-300ms loading times across the whole site.

And ofcourse, links are still the king.

The main thing that has changed is the length of time it takes to rank a site. Google is giving even more preference to brands as they do with each update. Therefore, outranking sites owned by brands ( which are the sites that usually occupy the top spots in the SERPs) has become way harder than it used to be.

Thanks to Google, there's a whole new market of NEG SEO opened up.

Someone once said that Penguin, would exponentially create more webspam over time. That was me who said that, and my bets looking good at half-time.

Penguin encouraged one Neg seo to create over 400k pages of webspam, all just for my site. Brings me back to XR3 days. But this time with some self destructive connotations for any start-ups in my market looking for search traffic.

It is really harder to do SEO nowadays.

I've been hit by Google updates heavily.

It seems that Google wants us to build a complete whitehat site without any manual backlinks.

Although I've only been at this some 2-3 years I know what SEO used to be because when I first visited here there were people that were considered to be kind of like SEO Gods.. Those same people are now looked at as pariahs. And their names shall not be mentioned.

That was then.

Now it's just the same. Nothing has changed.

There are new people that are newly considered to be SEO Gods. Who not long from now will be considered pariahs. And afterwards we will in all likelihood not mention their names

Then there are the people that have always been here, that truly are SEO Gods. And they've been saying the same things over and over ever since I first arrived. They were right then, and they're still right.

Nothings changed.

Nothing at all.

Except the price of cheap boxed wine. It went up about a dollar... Those *******s at Wal-Mart can't be trusted and have no loyalty to their customers.

Well, I do follow quicksprout, moz and ofcourse searchengineland for the latest updates of SEO and I think nothing is better than this article by Neil Patel given in the quicksprout, here is the link: What SEO Used to Be Versus What SEO Is Now

As Google is pretty much concerned about the content part, its very much necessary to go ahead with the approach that defines the involvement of content in a high priority. Like the articles, press releases, blogging etc. And along with that other tactics also keeps importance provided every thing should be done in a natural manner. No tactic should look like the promotional activity is going on.

The "smart side" of SEO really hasn't changed much. Google, and others, have wanted essentially the same thing from the beginning, to provide the best search results to their customers (the people using their search engine). They've simply become better and better at swatting away businesses that try to cheat their algorithms to get to the top ... instead of getting to the top by deserving that spot (because they are actually one of the best sites for that given keyword).

If anything, the waves of businesses dying with each new algorithm change should simply be a sobering wake-up call. If you want to survive and thrive in the long run, simply go with what Google, and others, want to provide to their customers. Actually be the site that best answers the questions underlying the keyword.

Please listen to my answer in audio. Vocaroo | Voice message

Transcription:

That's a great question Pushkalgogna. SEO has changed quite a bit and the main thing is that you should be really looking to make sure that you do is with your backlinks building, your offsite building. You really wanna make sure that the links that coming in from websites that are closely related to your website. So either being a primary relative, so exactly the same market on niche that your website is in linking in or something very closely related. For example someone that is in web design could also get links from someone like business consultant or SEO consultant or it could even be from someone say that was interior design. So that's cool the secondary theme and you wanna mix those secondary theme links and the primary theme links. You can also manufacture those but that's fill on the scope of this post and then in terms of onsite SEO, you really wanna be going sitewide, so ensuring that you fixing every single page of the website. Get your title tags done right, the H1's, make sure that you got at least 500-750 words content on every single page. Now you should get content that the code is w3c compliance, the load speed is fast and you just really making sure that your website is quickie clean. So to summarize, make sure that your links are coming from relevant website that the primary theme and secondary theme infer on its side, you really be wanna doing sitewide not just target page and making sure that it is quickie clean across the Google guidelines.

Content and link relevancy increasingly coupled with social media triggers are what count.

I'm glad we're coming out of that old easy spam phase, to be honest. I've never been good at bad practices and have no problem pillowing safe links, writing original content, and fleshing out the site to look 97% genuine... I have many years of experience in working with design clients which helps that sort of thing come easy though. I remember back in Ye Olde Days when SEO meant invisible GIFs and Meta descriptions crammed with shite.

Google is getting smarter. If you have 2 brains cells and a grain of common sense it's not hard and you can still rank a site pretty safely.