With WebDex celebrating its tenth year as one of the leading Dallas SEO companies, we thought we’d take a look at what’s changed over the past ten years. Not only have we made changes for WebDex Media, but we’ve tracked the biggest changes across the entire industry of SEO and internet marketing. Here are some of the biggest shifts we’ve spotted in the past decade:

Google Dominance – Do you remember AltaVista? How about Lycos? Ask Jeeves? Excite? At the beginning of the 21st Century, we were using dozens of search engines. Now, we can narrow them down pretty effectively to Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and Google holds the largest slice of the market pie.

Black Hat and White Hat SEO – In the early days of SEO, many companies were thinking more about fooling search engines than they were about making good content. As the industry matured, White Hat SEO became the standard in good optimization, while Black Hat methods became the mark of unscrupulous companies out to make a quick buck at the expense of the client.

SEO means more than page rank – Around the middle of the decade, SEO companies began to realize that page rank was only a small portion of good SEO. SEO companies then became marketing professionals to keep up with the competition. We had to provide more than just a first place listing, we had to keep people coming back to a site again and again. This is the point at which internet marketing became far more than just managing a site’s code. Keyword rich content became key, as did the importance of staying on top of dozens of marketing channels at once.

The Preferred Channels – Early on, there was a lot of talk about getting pages submitted to directories. While this is still viable for some markets, submitting everything to a directory won’t do much good. Optimization now is all about diversity, and the best channels for content are blogs, social network sites, video sites, and other places where content can be easily shared and distributed.

The Social Media Boom – Social marketing is not only a way to keep people connected, but many companies forget that social media sites often incorporate small search engines of their own. YouTube sees a huge volume of searches on its site in a day, and YouTube videos are regularly ranked on Google. Twitter has a lightning fast real time search function, as do Facebook and LinkedIn. By choosing to leave Social Media marketing up to clients, many SEO companies are neglecting a rising aspect of internet marketing.

WebDex Media is poised along the cutting edge, and we intend to keep it that way by always looking forward.