Keeping on top of trends

- So I've been writing about search engines and SEO for 20 years, and nothing stays still. This is not a fire-and-forget activity that you do. It is constantly reshaping itself, not every few years, but literally within the same year at times. One year, for example, Google announced that they were going to give a boost to mobile pages, and Mobilegeddon was born. And suddenly, everybody really had to pay a lot more attention to what the mobile-friendliness of their pages were if they wanted to continue to perform. So, if you've watched this video and you've watched some other videos and you've read some guides and you've done your SEO to begin with, the job isn't done. You really do need to keep up with things. It's not something that you can do because you watched this video and you've read a book and you've read a few guides, you've performed the initial SEO, and now you're done. SEO's going to constantly be changing and you want to keep up with the changes. So how do you do that? You can certainly go out to conferences. You may go to industry conferences that are in your own space, and you may find that they have sessions on SEO and search. And those are certainly great. But there are also conferences that take deeper dives that you can go out to. One of those conferences that we do is called SMX for Search Marketing Expo. A typical conference will have anywhere from 40 to 60 different sessions on all aspects of search, including SEO, which gives you an idea of what a deep dive it is. If you can't make it out to conferences, there are plenty of online resources. Our own Search Engine Land site, that's all we do everyday is have a staff of people covering all the latest changes that are happening in search including a daily newsletter that keeps you up-to-date with everything that's happening. There are other publications out such as The SEM Post or Search Engine Journal. There are online communities such as Moz or Webmaster World that will help you keep abreast of some of the changes that are happening. And the search engines themselves, Google has a Inside Search blog and Bing has their own blog that's all about search where you can keep up with the latest news that's happening there. You want to monitor these kinds of resources so that you know if a major change is coming down and that you're ready for it. Don't panic. It's not normal that suddenly all the SEO rules change overnight. They typically don't. Typically what happens is you just get trends of things that start to change, that one year you can see that mobile content is being rewarded more. But it will be incremental. And if you're picking up on that, it gives you the time to develop out your mobile-friendly content, say, over the course of a year so that if mobile-friendly content is an even stronger signal down the line, you're ready for it. Another example is Google likes to reward secure sites. It doesn't mean that if your site isn't secure, you're not going to be successful. Plenty of sites that are not secure are successful. But over time, secure sites might get rewarded more and more and more. So understanding now that this is a trend, that this is something that Google is starting to reward gives you the time to react to that in a manner so that you're not caught afoot down the line and not realizing, "I should have done this then."