this is grumpy SEO Guy episode 15. SEO history 101 how to Future proof your SEO the future of SEO algorithms and AI trust me these are all related you're listening to grumpy SEO guide the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work I'm the grumpy SEO guy and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO Agency for the last 14 years in this podcast I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience discussing tips and strategies and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this
industry if you listen to this podcast you will know more about SEO than 99 of people on the planet ready let's get started I'm the grumpy SEO guy let me tell you why I'm grumpy today I'm grumpy today well you know what I'm grumpy every day this let's get on with the show in this episode we're going to talk about the history of SEO but I want to make something very clear this is not going to be a list of every Google algorithm update okay because first of all that's not really related to what we're
talking about and second of all you can just go online and get that information if you want it we're going to talk more about the history of SEO from a broader perspective and it's important because in order to know the reason that SEO works the way it does today it's important to know the way it used to work and when you understand the trends of how search engine optimization has changed over time you will have a higher chance of being able to Future proof any SEO work that you might be doing and we're going to
talk more about that later but before we do that my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now a quick disclaimer before we get started everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience this podcast does not constitute advice or Services what worked for me may or may not work for you okay back to the show so for now let's get started this
is going to be pretty high level and we're not going to cover everything we're just going to talk about the big changes between the way it was and the way it is and of course why okay so a long time ago and I'm talking you know late 90s mid 90s okay search engine optimization tended to work in a specific way and before we get into that any further I'm going to ask you a question and I've asked you this question before and I'm going to give you the answer but what is the purpose of a
search engine the purpose of the search engine is to make money okay now some people might think well the purpose of the search engine is to show relevant results for the thing that you search for yes but think about it if a search engine gives bad quality results what are you going to do you're going to stop using that search engine okay if you stop using that search engine what's going to happen they're not going to make any money why aren't they going to make any money well just super quick example there's many many reasons
for example let's say you're using Google sometimes when you search for things instead of just the organic results you also get ads if you click on an ad Google makes money if everyone were to stop using Google nobody would ever click on their ads now of course there's other ways that Google makes money but this is just the easiest one to explain right now so it's in the search engine's best interest to show you the best results the most relevant results and quality results okay the search engine's job is not to show you the best
results the search engine's job is to make money and in order to keep you using it it has to give you good results therefore search engines over time change their algorithms to try and give you superior quality results compared to their competition and compared to what they did in the past okay now let's go back to the beginning days of search engines they all work pretty much the same and before you say that this is a terrible algorithm I want you to understand nobody had ever thought of this before and so at the time it
was a good algorithm so the algorithm basically worked like this remember this is like a long long time ago the algorithm basically worked like this the more often a phrase appeared on a site the more relevant that site was considered regarding that phrase in other words let's say I have a website about dishwashers maybe I'm maybe I'm selling dishwashers maybe I'm repairing dishwashers okay I have a side about dishwashers it's likely that my website would use the word dishwashers pretty often why because I'm talking about dishwashers I'm repairing dishwashers I'm selling dishwashers right it would
make sense that the word dishwasher or dishwashers would appear on my site it would make perfect sense now if you have a website and your website has literally nothing to do with dishwashers well it would make sense that the word dishwashers wouldn't appear on your site I mean maybe like once maybe you you know were telling a story and you wrote something like oh yeah and then we bought a new dishwasher okay but like it appears once on your whole site so it's probably not really relevant for dishwasher right but my website which is selling
dishwashers it would make sense that it would have the word dishwasher a lot okay that makes sense now you're probably thinking this and you're right that that's easy to manipulate all you would have to do if you wanted to rank for dishwasher was put the word dishwasher more times than anyone else on your website and you know what that's what people did it was very common in the 90s to have the words that you wanted to rank for they people would put them at the very bottom of their websites they would use like they would
use like five point font they would use like four point font right like you you couldn't find this unless you were looking for it but usually if you scroll down to the bottom of a website it would say you know dishwashers dishwashers dishwashers best dishwashers how to fix a dishwasher best dishwasher repairman dishwasher services like all the things like all the all the all the versions of the keyword that you could think of like multiple times I'm talking dozens if not hundreds of times at the bottom of a website and you know what it worked
now don't do that today that's literally like one of the worst things you could do in fact you will get a penalty if you do that today we'll talk more about that later just I want you to understand that's how people used to do it you can make a website rank for literally anything you wanted to just by putting that word on your website more than somebody else now again it's easy to manipulate and it kind of seems a little bit foolish today to have a search engine algorithm that works that way but when there
were no search engine algorithms because search engines were a brand new thing that was a pretty smart way to do it honestly like because what else are you gonna do you know it makes sense that a website that has a search term on it more often is probably more relevant for that search term than a website that doesn't have that search term on it so the next thing that happened was people started to notice they're like well this guy just put the word over and over on his website he's manipulating the system okay so you
know what people did they would have the background on their website be a certain color and then they would put the text they would do the same thing they would put the keywords you know multiple times on their website at the bottom but they would just use the same color as the background color so like you couldn't see it oh and on that note don't do that today okay having text that's the same color as your background will get you a penalty and that's the reason why because everybody used to do it definitely do not
do it today okay the Crawlers that were looking at your website they could read it but like people couldn't like humans couldn't read it because it was the same color as the background now you may have noticed that at the bottom of the website there was this giant spot of what looked like nothing but you could still scroll in the website let's say the website was blue okay the background was blue there would be this giant area where everything was blue and it just looked like blue background but if you highlighted it you could see
that the words the keywords they're trying to rank for were in there and they were blue just like the background so it was obvious what they were doing okay anyway so that's how search engines worked for a while and again it sounds dumb but it was a pretty it was it was a pretty effective like first first generation of search engine algorithm I suppose because again what else were they supposed to do okay so somewhere along the line another search engine was created we'll call the search engine Google because it was Google so somewhere along
the line Google comes around and okay listen this might not be like I'm not an expert on search engine history okay but I'm pretty sure this is how it happened somewhere along the line Google comes around I think it was like the late the late 90s it might have been the mid 90s I feel like it's 1995 that Google came into business but I'm not sure I don't think people actually started really using Google until I want to say the early 2000s I'm trying to remember when I started using Google so I'm I'm remembering back
in the day there was there was lycos and excite and Alta Vista and Yahoo I think those are the main search engines back in the day in like the in like the 90s like the mid 90s and then there's a search engine called metacrawler and metacrawler was awesome because it combined the results from all the other search engines so I can't remember exactly which ones I think it was all of them it was probably the four that I just mentioned but anyway like back in the day you would search for something on like excite and
you might get like one set of results and then you'd search for something on Yahoo and you might get a different set of results and you know because search engines weren't really that good and then you could use meta crawler and it would show you the results from all the search engines it was awesome okay so anyways I think it was like in the mid 90s Google came into being and Google's main idea was let's not do it that way let's use links okay and now I'm really gonna shorten everything because again this is not
going to be a history of Google algorithm updates okay but basically from my experience and again this might not be the 100 official way but this is my experience as part of the SEO community beginning in 2009 when I really got into this to this to this field um this is how it worked based on the the collective understanding of the groups of which I was a member at the time how's that for a for a sentence okay so Google came around and they're like hey let's not focus on the text so much let's look
at the links and in the early days of my career and I'm you know 2009-ish from my understanding based on what I have seen it was very important to have a lot of backlinks and to have your anchor text in the backlinks okay now all of those things are still important well the number of backlinks isn't quite so important today because today Authority is more important than number of backlinks but anchor text is still important but not as important as it was I'm going to talk about both of those things later don't worry so anyway
in 2009 there was a big industry for the use of automated programs and I've talked about these before but they could build backlinks very quickly you press a button on a program it will build you hundreds or thousands of blog comment backlinks which are Super spammy by the way and Forum profile backlinks again that kind of backlink is super spammy but back in the day it what well it's always been super spammy but back in the day spam wasn't necessarily a bad thing so you could rank a website pretty quickly with thousands of backlinks from
things like blog comments and Forum profile links and you just had to have the keywords that you wanted to rank for in the anchor text and you'd be at the top of the search engines I want to talk a little bit right now about having the keywords that you want to rank for in the anchor text because while that is still important okay it's still important and it's still the way that you can rank a website now for words that don't even appear on the website and I talked about that in another episode you can't
do it as much as you used to okay so there's something now called an over optimization penalty and I talk about this in the penalty episode which is episode two but basically if too great of a percentage of your anchor text meaning the links from other websites the words that are in the links from other websites if too great of a percentage of those are your keywords you get a penalty so if you want to rank for blue widgets back in 2009 you'd probably want 80 or 90 or 100 of your backlinks to use the
anchor text blue Widgets or some form of blue widgets but today if you were to do that if you were to have anything even even approaching 80 or 90 or 100 you would get an over optimization penalty again go listen to episode 2 if you want to learn more about that but it's still important today but the percentages should be much lower I would probably not exceed you know 10 of your backlinks and truthfully I would probably keep it closer to five percent having a single anchor text today because it was so used in the
past that the search engines specifically changed their algorithms to account for that so you know it's still important but it can't be done with the level of spammy frequency that it was a long time ago now that was 2009 ish okay 2009 2010 people were really excited about these programs and then you know shortly after that there were some algorithm updates and low quality backlinks again like Forum profiles and blog comments stopped being so effective and today if you have too many of them you can get penalized there's a there's a spammy backlink kind of
penalty um I actually had something like that happen to one of my sites and I talked about this in the penalty episode which is the second episode but uh if you want to go listen to that you can but here's the here's the short version I had a website I just made this website for fun I was just getting into SEO I had made a website it was about a very specific uh practice Within the field of martial arts okay let's let's put it that way I had a great website I had handwritten all the
content I think there were like 15 or 20 articles on the site it was really I was very proud of it it was ranking very well okay now back in the day in 2009 it was very common to make what you could consider an article site so what people would do and there were tons of these websites they were the worst but anyways what they would do is they would find a website they would take existing content they would run it through a spinner which if you remember from earlier episodes is a program that basically
just like uses a thesaurus on every word and creates unique content but the content doesn't make any sense I gave an example of that in a different episode but basically okay here's the thing let me side note people when they were offering their SEO services around 2009-2010 would make a big deal about unique content we have unique content because remember people think that duplicate content is bad it's not necessarily bad I've talked about that a lot before so I'm not going to get into it again right now but everybody was like oh you need content
oh unique content okay good unique content is awesome don't misunderstand but remember 99 of SEO providers are scammers and Liars so while they were correct in telling you that it was unique content they didn't tell you that it was rubbish quality content because all they were doing was spinning some original article and making dozens of copies where every word was basically a synonym of every other word but the result when they were finished didn't make any sense if you actually read it so it spun content is basically worthless as far as providing value to anybody
goes anyway so everybody was like unique content unique content yay but like they didn't tell you that it was fun content and so you'd have you'd have a lot of people offering SEO services that involved this low quality spun content and anyways these websites so that was that was the end of my side note so anyways I guess what I'm saying is spinning content was popular for some reason even though it was like I don't know like my my agency has never spawned content because I'll get to that in a minute but anyways listen you
had all these websites these article websites article directories you can call them that and they would take one article and they would spin it and they would post it on their website which gave them unique content yay and they would have a link at the bottom back to the original I guess it's some kind of like reference or something okay which in and of itself is not really a bad thing here's why it became a bad thing you remember my website that I told you about all of these article sites stole my articles spun them
put them on their websites and then link back to my website okay why is that a problem because all of these article sites eventually were labeled as spam by the search engines which makes sense because they were garbage but because they all linked to me you remember the concept of bad neighborhood therefore my website got a penalty too so my awesome website with high quality content got a spammy link penalty and I had nothing to do with it it was just people liked my content they stole it they spun it they linked back to me
they got penalized and because they were linking to me I got penalized now I'm sure some people are going to have some different opinions though maybe your content wasn't as good as you thought it was blah blah okay guess what you know what I did first thing I did and I talked about this in the penalty episode two I think is I tried to use the disavow tool okay to disavow bad links and I'm pretty sure I mentioned in that episode that I don't think that's actually what the disavow tool does because I never had
success with it I think I waited a couple months I had hundreds of links there were literally hundreds of these spammy websites linking to mine I found them all I mean I found as many as I could it was hundreds I I'm sure there were others that I didn't get anyway I disavowed them I followed all of the procedures that you're supposed to I diss about all these spammy links literally nothing happened my site was still penalized it was nowhere near the top of the search engines whatever I believe I'm not really a conspiracy theorist
I believe that the disavow tool is to help search engines find spammy websites I don't believe that it actually will get you any link juice back I don't believe that it will cause the search engines to ignore the spammy links which is what it's supposed to do I don't think that's what it does I think it's a c I think it's more of a kind of spy tool to help the search engines find spammy backlinks because if it were the case that the disavow tool performed the way it's supposed to my website would have recovered
its ranking but it never did but you know what I did I made an exact copy of my website on a brand new domain all the content was the same everything was exactly the same and within like two weeks I was back on the first page of the search engines and let me just clarify something here too I did not redirect the old domain to the new domain because I bet there's a person listening to this who has a question well I heard somewhere that if you change domains you should redirect your pre previous domain
to your current domain yes the answer to that is sometimes but if there is a penalty on the old domain you do not redirect it to the new domain you Salvage as many links from other sites as you can and hopefully you control those sites because hopefully you're doing it the way my agency does and you have a portfolio of authoritative domains and you can point them to whomever you want whenever you want otherwise you're going to be stuck chasing links and I talk about this on other episodes but people tend to like things like
guest posting and Link Outreach and all these other options where you do not have control of the links and then for whatever reason if you ever need to point those links to a different domain you might not even be able to because you don't control them with my agency we control all the domains so if we ever have a client for whatever reason who needs to change domains and I talk about this in episode two when I describe a client we had who got negative seo'd and what we did to fix it well hint they
had to move to a new domain which is quite often the only way to recover from a penalty but I talk more about that in a different episode anyway it was very easy for us to point all of our links to his new domain and start building authority because we controlled those links can you imagine if you had a powerful link from somebody and for whatever reason you needed to change it to a new domain but there is no way to get a hold of them or they weren't responding to your emails and you had
this amazing link which probably cost you a lot of money by the way and it's now pointing to a previous domain that is serving you no purpose guess what you just wasted your money that's why you should control as many domains as you can for link building purposes because you can do whatever you need to with them and for whatever reason if you need to change domains it's very easy to point all your links to the new domain now therefore it has nothing to do with my content which was great by the way my content
was awesome because I hand wrote everything it had everything to do with the spammy links and just for fun because I feel like mentioning it again the disavow tool did absolutely nothing I have never had success with the disavow tool I have never had any clients have success with the disavow tool and I have never met anyone who has ever had success with the disavow tool I'm not saying it doesn't work I'm saying I have met zero people who have successfully used the disavow tool and gotten their penalty removed so consider that I guess in
the way you want anyway the spammy links from things like Forum profiles and blog comments became devalued the search engine said hey these are garbage they're easy to automate let's not consider them and so slowly there is this change from number of backlinks to quality of backlinks um so we talked about anchor text right let's go back to that really quick if you wanted to rank for anything you want like I don't know t-shirts blue widgets let's say let's say blue widgets okay great example blue widgets back in the day all you had to do
was get tons of backlinks with the anchor text blue widgets super easy super easy in fact there was even something called a Google bomb where people I'm trying to remember people would on their websites or on forums they would they everybody would pick a keyword that they wanted to rank for a certain thing and then they would all make links to that certain thing and I think I might not be correct about this but I think there is one for like biggest idiot in the world or something so if you typed in biggest idiot in
the world everybody had linked to this picture of George Bush and so I I might have this wrong I might have the names wrong I might have the text wrong but I think that was I think that was the the concept everybody said biggest it was like biggest idiot biggest idiot in the world biggest idiot on the planet something along those lines and it was like a picture of George Bush and so hahaha supposed to be funny right so anyone I don't know why anybody would ever type in biggest idiot in the world but if
they did the first result was a picture of George Bush now why am I mentioning that because that literally supports the fact that the only thing that mattered was anchor text and number of backlinks so anyway the search engines changed that because it was too easy to influence the results okay so they switched over to what I call the high school popularity algorithm now this is like the authority-based algorithm but it's kind of more like high school and I've said this before but if you've been to high school you know at least in America um
you understand how there's cool kids and then there's everybody else and how do you get to be a cool kid you have to be friends with other cool kids right now are the cool kids the best at sports you know maybe I don't know maybe are the cool kids um the most likely to be successful in the future not necessarily are the cool kids the smartest kids in the school and not necessarily but they're cool okay and why are they cool because they're friends with other cool kids so and yes this is totally stereotypical but
I'm pretty sure you know what I'm talking about too if you've been to high school anyways how do you get to become a cool kid in in high school can you just be awesome at something no that doesn't make you cool can you be the best at sports again like in America that that might actually make you cool but not necessarily can you be the most intelligent kid in high school no that's not going to make you cool how do you become cool in high school by becoming friends with the cool kids that's how you
become cool now that's basically how ranking works that's basically how the authority algorithm works how do you get to the top of the search engines do you get a lot of backlinks well no that's not going to get you to the top of the search engines do you have great content well this won't get you to the top of the search engines what if you get backlinks from authoritative websites well yeah that will actually give you Authority and that will get you to the top of the search engines when you're in high school having a
lot of friends doesn't necessarily make you cool your friends have to be the cool people then you're cool having a lot of backlinks doesn't necessarily get you Authority your links have to come from websites that have authority that's why I call it the high school popularity algorithm I don't I I that's definitely not like the official name for it but I think that's the easiest way to explain it so anyway it it kind of it kind of makes sense look it kind of makes sense that they would do it this way okay it's definitely superior
to the first way right where you can just like spam your website with whatever and rank for that like definitely definitely better than doing it that way okay the theory behind the authority algorithm is that websites with authority are probably better why are they probably better they are probably better because more people link to them and because better quality websites link to them okay they're not necessarily better but they're probably better so if the search engine is considering Authority in which websites it shows you when you search for something by using websites with greater Authority
it is probably giving you better quality results okay again not necessarily how many times have you seen a website at the top of the results that has terrible unhelpful content I see it quite often but you know what it's on a very authoritative domain therefore it ranks well you want a high school analogy how often have you seen a popular kid do something dumb okay and you know what he's still popular I mean it's kind of like a it's kind of like an authoritative website providing garbage content that doesn't help you and I even gave
a specific example of this in another episode and as long as you have authority and you don't do anything super stupid okay like get a penalty you're gonna be at the top of the search engines as long as you're a cool kid in high school as long as you don't do something completely stupid you're still going to be a popular kid okay it's basically how it works um so I don't know like I wasn't very cool in high school so I I don't mind giving that analogy but I mean I I own a tech agency
so how how cool could I have been in in high school but anyways um um I remember so in in high school I don't want to give away my age in uh in high school the internet when I was in high school the internet was just becoming a thing and I actually remember one of my friends laughing at me because I told him that I used the internet so yeah um anyway everybody uses the internet now I guess all the cool kids anyways so that's why it works this way now there's two more things I
want to talk about the future of search engine optimization and future proofing whatever you do let's talk about future proofing first okay there's a reason that most of our clients are not significantly affected by algorithm updates now if you spend any time on SEO forums or in different SEO uh environments I guess you could say people always complain about algorithm updates they'll say oh our client was at the top and then this stupid Google algorithm update happened and now they're not at the top anymore and they're always mad about it they're always so mad about
it or like maybe it was one of their sites or we were at the top and then and I'm so mad at Google remember it's like all right I guess good you're okay whatever look this is the reason and I can't say every client but most of our clients are not affected by algorithm updates um and it is this I think it was 2010 I was watching the evolution of search engines I was watching how programs that you know create all the spammy backlinks at the touch of a button were becoming devalued and I said
this was just a guess honestly but it seems like I was right I said anything that can be automated will be devalued okay I'll say it again anything that can be automated will be devalued so I was correct that we should not use things like spun content because spun content isn't immediately discernible by the search engines but if a human lands on that site for whatever reason maybe they're doing a manual review of something which happens by the way they'll say oh spun content yeah this is Spam penalized and then your clients might lose their
Rank and so on it's bad and I said we're not going to use any of these automation programs we're not going to use any push a button and get thousands of backlinks why because it can be automated it will be devalued and sure enough that's what happened now the way my agency runs which I mentioned numerous times we own a large portfolio of authoritative domains that we use to link to our clients to provide them with link juice and get them to and keep them at the top of the search engines okay we don't do
link Outreach we don't do guest posting We don't rely on other people because that's dangerous inconsistent inefficient and I don't like to let other people be in control of our backlinks because you really can't trust anybody okay again not wearing a tinfoil hat but come on it's the SEO industry you really trust anyone anyway but listen my agency followed this rule of only do things by hand only do things that can't be automated and make everything look awesome and natural and it's been working fantastically for over a decade so I don't I don't know anyways
let's talk about let's talk about future proofing I honestly believe that if you follow this rule anything that can be automated will be devalued therefore don't automate anything and more specifically don't do anything that can be automated I think you will be very successful going forward I don't think you'll have anything to worry about with that said there was no chat GPT back in the day when we were doing this okay I'm not saying let me just be clear right now I'm not saying don't use chat GPT okay if I were starting over today I
would probably use chat GPT but I would probably not use it the way everybody uses it okay why because there are programs that can detect with reasonable consistency content that was made by hand versus content that was made by AI it is conceivable that in the future that will be something that the search engines consider they will say oh this is all this is AI generated content we're going to not rank it as highly as handwritten content why because AI content can basically be used I don't want to say to cheat but you could definitely
produce content more quickly with AI than you could if you were actually writing it with that said I'm not saying don't use chat GPT I'm saying don't use it in a way that's obvious that you're using chat GPT okay I'm gonna leave it at that for now but anyways let's talk about the future of SEO okay because I honestly think that results are going to rely on Authority until a certain point and I don't know how long until we get to this point okay but let me explain to you how this is going to work
right now as we talked about it's in the search engine's best interest to deliver quality results so that you keep using the search engine and you know occasionally click on an ad and the search engine makes money okay Authority is currently the optimal way to probably deliver great results now again there's plenty of exceptions there's plenty of websites that have tons of authority and terrible content that rank very well there's tons of websites that have amazing content and no Authority and don't rank at all I'm not saying that it works flawlessly it doesn't but that's
the way it works so in the future when the search engines are able to accurately gauge the quality of content to the degree that they know which website answers your question and serves the result based on the answer to your question and not the amount of authority a website has when we get to that point and I don't think we're there when we get to that point I don't think Authority is going to matter at all why because some new website that nobody's ever heard of that was recently published might perfectly answer your question and
therefore should be the number one result after the search engines get to a point where they can do that I don't think Authority is going to matter anymore okay at that point it's going to be all about quality content we're not there yet I don't think we're gonna get there anytime in the near future I I kind of hope we do because that would make the search engines better okay and then I wouldn't have to keep paying for my portfolio of websites because there would be no need for them anymore look honestly when the search
engines can tell which website answers perfectly the searcher's question there will be no more need for Authority however search engines are not there yet therefore Authority is the most important factor and I've said this before but let me say it now too in 14 years over 14 years actually of running an SEO industry we've had over 400 client projects okay in less than one percent of those we had to do something to the client's content okay in over 99 of them okay not 99 over 99 of them the answer to their problem was giving them
more Authority by getting them backlinks with correct use of anchor text and from authoritative domains and that got them to the top of the search engine their problem was that they were not at the top of the search engine the solution to their problem was not changing their content it was getting them backlinks from authoritative websites and that solved their problem by getting them to the top of the search engines in over 99 percent of cases anyway I think that's everything that I wanted to talk about for this episode let's summarize what we learned back
in the day search engines only looked at content and the more frequently you had certain terms appear on your site the better you would rank for that but that was easy to game so Google came around and said hey guys let's not do it that way let's look at backlinks because that's a better metric for value and then number of backlinks was important anchor text was important and then they said whoa whoa whoa hey guys people are gaming the system too much look at all these spammy backlinks let's use Authority instead and then they started
coming up with various measures of authority in a backlink from an authoritative site counts for more than a backlink from a low quality site and that's basically how it works today so there you go in the future Authority is likely to be required until the search engines get to a point where they can specifically pick websites that answer the searcher's question and show that result and not have to rely on Authority but in the meantime Authority is an analog for Quality with the assumption that the more Authority website has probably the better it is so
it's probably fine to show a more authoritative website in the results than a less authoritative website in the results and for that reason 99 of SEO now involves getting Authority if you're listening to grumpy SEO guy the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense doesn't work join us next Wednesday when we talk about how to do SEO on a brand new website including when and how quickly you should do certain things this year