Google Loves Brands
What I found important is how Google now deals with website rankings and quality. In the old days, there were specific ways that you could use in order to rank high on Google. You optimised your website's content, used the right tags, selected keywords, planted them in the right place and got good quality links to your site. These techniques when executed well could almost guarantee you a top place for your selected keywords. This doesn't work any more...
Google has been focusing on machine learning. More specifically what they are trying to do is measure the quality of a website in a similar way as a person would and then use all their metrics to give it the right ranking. So we have a big shift in the way Google ranks websites. They are now focusing on the experience that the user is having on the website. As posted in the article mentioned above: "What is the experience of this website? Is it creating a brand that people are going to love and share and reward and trust?"
What this means for you is that you need to focus on building your brand both offline and online. When working on your brand online, forget about the old-school SEO tactics and focus on building websites that people like using and visiting often. Websites that create trust and give them information they will want to share and recommend.
