The Best SEO Strategies in 2009
Search engine optimization, better known SEO, is the most important single investment any website owner can make for their ongoing success. Every year the strategies that go into SEO become slightly more specific and slightly more nuanced. Search engines themselves are always changing, becoming more accurate and more effective in responding to specific user inquiries, and more selective about sites that may be spam. That’s why website owners everywhere need to reevaluate their search engine optimization strategies every year to make sure they are still employing the best strategies 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’90s 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.
To and through 2009, however, search engines have striven to deliver more accurate results for their users, and no search engine has done more to increase accuracy than Google. In the’90’s, Google’s algorithm was to count back-links and prioritize. If you had enough back-links to “good” sites, and you had keyword anchor text in those links, and you had keywords in your content, you could effectively optimize your site.
There is a lot of value in the old SEO strategy. It’s still very helpful to integrate keyword-rich links to your site. You still need keywords in your content. What is different, however, is that Google and other engines have been working overtime to find ways to discern quality content from pages that are not spam, but not especially useful, either. Websites don’t just go through popularity contests by building back-links; they must also deliver quality, original content that can pass muster with the language filters.
Google and the other search engines have begun to distill word patterns from the news, from books, and online sources to contrast and reject keyword stuffing. This has made the quality of content on your site a lot more important than it used to be. Where website owners once made a point of stuffing a page with 4%, 5%, 6%, or even 7% or more of a keyword, now the optimal percentage is just 3 to 4 keywords per 100 words in text. Google now values natural speech and rejects repetitive use of keywords, even when it falls below the threshold for 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.
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Posted: February 21st, 2010 under Web Development.
Tags: Web Development
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