When I first started out writing content on the Internet, I didn’t even know that it was a possibility for the average person to make some decent coin that way. When I first started out, I had a really basic mailing list consisting of mostly friends and family and I would manually send out my articles to them. When I did finally get around to having an actual website, it was powered by Geocities and it had one of those strange categorized URL structures where my website was effectively located on a subfolder of a subfolder of a subfolder under the Geocities domain.
At the time–this was in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s–there really was no such thing as search engine optimization for me, because the thought never even occurred to me. However, when this hobby started translating into a possible career, I was far more familiar with what it meant to run a blog and I started learning about SEO. While some of those basics may still apply, many of the “best practices” of the time have since been thrown out of the window.
A short while ago, Neil Patel of Quick Sprout posted an infographic describing the difference between what SEO used to be and what SEO is now. We’re not even looking at that long of a time frame, as much of “what SEO used to be” was really only a few short years ago.
