Probably the most important single investment any website owner can make is search engine optimization, also known as SEO. Every year the strategies that go into effective SEO become a just a little more advanced and a little more specific. Search engines themselves are constantly refined, responding to user queries more accurately, and recognizing more spam sites. And as search engines evolve, website owners everywhere need to review their SEO strategies every year to make sure they are still the best available.
In the early days of the internet, SEO was blissfully simple. You built your website. You added some meta tags. You stuffed your content with all the keywords it would hold, and you got traffic. This was back in the 1990s when spider technology was relatively new, and content was much more limited. Search engine users were once happy to get a "decent" match for their search terms.
In 2009, however, search engines have evolved to make search more accurate. Google is the prime example. Ten years ago Google's algorithm counted back-links and prioritized. You got more credit for a back-link to a desirable site, and, as the system developed, you were penalized for having back-links to a spam site. Putting keyword anchor text into links would optimize your site for those keywords, even if they did not appear in your content.
Keyword-rich links from well-respected external sites is still the best way to get visitors from Google. What's new is that Google has been working night and day to develop more natural heuristics to discern quality content. No longer absolutely requiring websites to win popularity contests by building up external links, Google has begun to use natural language filters. These filters discern if the text flows as if it written from writer to reader without concern for keywords, or if it is keyword-heavy or even spam.
Certain language patters appear in literature, in news reports, and in countless other sources online. Google and other engines have started distilling these word patterns and integrating them into their algorithms to rule out websites that are clearly keyword stuffing. This makes quality content a lot more valuable than it once was. Website owners once could optimize a page by stuffing it with a 7% keyword density. Nowadays, a 3 to 4% keyword density is optimal. More is not better. If keyword density looks unnatural to a search engine, it will reject the page, even if it is not spam.
The top strategy for search engine optimization in 2009 is still to write useful copy with keyword optimization, combined with back-links to high page-rank sites with carefully chosen anchor text. Just avoid getting greedy. Keyword optimization that does not overreach with great user-friendly content will be the way to keep your page rankings high in 2009.
In the early days of the internet, SEO was blissfully simple. You built your website. You added some meta tags. You stuffed your content with all the keywords it would hold, and you got traffic. This was back in the 1990s when spider technology was relatively new, and content was much more limited. Search engine users were once happy to get a "decent" match for their search terms.
In 2009, however, search engines have evolved to make search more accurate. Google is the prime example. Ten years ago Google's algorithm counted back-links and prioritized. You got more credit for a back-link to a desirable site, and, as the system developed, you were penalized for having back-links to a spam site. Putting keyword anchor text into links would optimize your site for those keywords, even if they did not appear in your content.
Keyword-rich links from well-respected external sites is still the best way to get visitors from Google. What's new is that Google has been working night and day to develop more natural heuristics to discern quality content. No longer absolutely requiring websites to win popularity contests by building up external links, Google has begun to use natural language filters. These filters discern if the text flows as if it written from writer to reader without concern for keywords, or if it is keyword-heavy or even spam.
Certain language patters appear in literature, in news reports, and in countless other sources online. Google and other engines have started distilling these word patterns and integrating them into their algorithms to rule out websites that are clearly keyword stuffing. This makes quality content a lot more valuable than it once was. Website owners once could optimize a page by stuffing it with a 7% keyword density. Nowadays, a 3 to 4% keyword density is optimal. More is not better. If keyword density looks unnatural to a search engine, it will reject the page, even if it is not spam.
The top strategy for search engine optimization in 2009 is still to write useful copy with keyword optimization, combined with back-links to high page-rank sites with carefully chosen anchor text. Just avoid getting greedy. Keyword optimization that does not overreach with great user-friendly content will be the way to keep your page rankings high in 2009.
About the Author:
Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.
No comments:
Post a Comment