SEO is a field that changes rapidly, and if you don’t stay on top of it, you could get left out in the cold very quickly. Even search engine marketing professionals often have trouble keeping up with the latest changes, and they must be studying search engine marketing (SEM) constantly in order to stay on top.

For awhile, it was pretty simple to get a top search engine position. You just needed to have more keywords in strategic locations than your competitors. Unfortunately, this made it very easy to game the system, and spammers soon took over most of the top spots on many of the popular search engines.

Finally search engines started penalizing sites for this tactic, and things like keyword stuffing (repeating the same word or phrase over and over, often in invisible text) became a thing of the past. Soon it became more difficult to gain search rankings, because the playing field was leveled.

Google and other search engines started looking at link popularity as a way to determine the quality of a site, figuring sites with a lot of links must be pretty good, because people don’t usually link to really poor sites. This started the era of backlinks, where the only way to get on top was to be the site with the most links.

But link popularity isn’t quite as important as it once was. The newest SEO technology is LSI, or latent semantic indexing. The system is rather complex, but basically it means the search engines look for themes or patterns in order to determine relevancy.

Rather than just checking to be sure you have certain words on your page, it looks for related words. Using LSI, a site about rats might rank for the word “rodent,” even if the word rodent didn’t appear on the page at all!

Although this ultimately means it will be more difficult to trick search engines, it will also make it possible to write better content. Because there will be less focus on actual keywords, you can write to make your visitors happy rather than trying to fit your keywords into your content at a certain density.

Hopefully this will eventually improve both the quality of the search results provided by search engines as well as Internet content itself!


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