dimanche 16 août 2009

Search Engine Optimization - The Latent Link

By Daniel McGonagle

Search Engines are not static. And you need to respond to emerging strategies in Search Engine Optimization to keep traffic flowing to your site.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making your websites desirable to search engines. Many aspects of SEO will never change. However there are some things that do change. This article addresses the things you can do on-page to optimize your sites to help them rank well.

Search engines provide valuable services for Internet users and they are for-profit businesses. So when webmasters tried to fool the search engined with inappropriate tags or keywords or with overloading their sites with keywords -"stuffing", that was considered to be black-hat (bad guy) techniques. Search engines did not stay "fooled" for long because that would diminish the value of their services.

When the meta-tag stuffers got banned or sand-boxed, new SEO rules came along. Part of the new rankings methodology involved giving value to the kind of "votes" sites were getting. Backlinks became more of an effective way for the search engines to assess what sites were really about content-wise. So the next thing the search engines did was to give higher rankings based on the number and quality of backlinks each site had.

When social bookmarking hit the net, it became extremely easy to get thousands of backlinks a day. Ah. But the social bookmarking cooled off after they were devalued because there were so many and so easy to get. Now most social bookmarking sites have their default link attributes set to no-follow.

So after the search engines decided that metatags should hold less value, then devalued social bookmarking links, the next step was to increase the value they give to certain on-page optimization factors. One of the "new" trends in search engine optimization the last several years has been LSI, or latent semantic indexing and LSA, latent semantic analysis.

Once the search engines began placing more value on LSI and LSA they became familiar terms. Now webmasters have a certain way to build websites to be search-engine friendly. If your content is using some or all of your primary keywords and some related keywords, your sites have a better chance of ranking well, even if you do not have a lot of backlinks. Yet, many webmasters still build sites without on-page optimization and miss out.

Pay attention to how you optimize your site for search engines so you can benefit from the traffic they generate. Once you learn how to improve your SEO you are beginning to get serious about the value of your site's content. Then you will start to see improvements in the activity at your site. Learn what on-page optimization your site needs to pay close attention to in order to rank well with less effort.

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