Using SEO for Internet marketing is not a complicated concept. Just like traditional marketing, it could be made easier and more effective if you would have the necessary knowledge and skills. If you thought good and effective writing of search engine optimization articles to be posted for your Website is enough, you should reconsider your beliefs.

Coming up with good and optimized content is sure one way of optimizing your Website so that Internet users would have more and easier access to it. You should be reminded that traffic matters in the world of Internet marketing. The more frequent users and visitors that regularly visit your Website, the more your online business is getting lucrative and highly profitable. Online advertisers sure know that if your Website is frequently visited, there are greater chances that their ads posted within the Webpage would get noticed by targeted readers or potential customers. Hence, your online income from the maintaining the site would be more significant.

There are several effective techniques that you could do to optimize or improve the potential profitability of your Website. Follow these simple techniques, which may seem like recommendations to you, to ensure that your Website would be more effective in its goals of luring more regular users and potential clients for you and your advertisers.

* Register or submit the content of your Website to as many directories as possible. If you would be able to submit it to search engines, it would also be good, though when your Webpage is activated and visited by users, it would automatically be included in the list results from search engine searches. There are several specialized software in the market that would help you regularly submit content and Websites to as many other sites and online businesses possible. Ensure that your Website is properly indexed by giant and popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

* Of course, it would count a lot of you would make your Website as unique and interesting as possible. Being different is often helping invigorate curiosity and patronage among online readers. Good, reliable, informative and comprehensible content would help a lot in making sure online readers would keep on coming back to the Website. Word of mouth would result, making up for a better and more effective advertising.

* Create reciprocal links with other Websites. Online businesses, though there is intense competition, is facilitating for healthy co-existence and cooperation. In building reciprocal links, you would be agreeing to post ads and links of other Websites. In turn, your ads and links would be posted in theirs. Regularly check out if your links are well placed and posted in your partner sites.

* Develop a site map for your Website. Site maps are like table of contents that are placed on top of the page or above the entire content. The map contains the basic content of your site and will make it easier for online users to navigate and roam around within your Website.

* Of course, the best and most effective technique in optimizing your Website is through making the content reliable and worthy of being read. It is true that the Internet contains all the basic information people would need. Because it is wide and easily utilized by all sorts of people and Website developers, expect that there are too many contents that are false and are not worth reading. Make sure the content of your Website do not fall within that category.

If your Website is good enough, there would be word of mouth to be started by satisfied readers. The popularity of your site would rise and more people would check it out. If there is satisfaction among readers, they surely would keep on coming back for more, in which case, you may need to regularly update your site. Sites with blogs tend to update regularly and thus empower the process of SEO.

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.^[1] The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine’s own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the earliest known use of the phrase search engine optimization was a spam message posted on Usenet on July 26, 1997.^[2]

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provided a guide to each page’s content. But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable because the webmaster’s account of keywords in the meta tag were not truly relevant to the site’s actual keywords. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags caused pages to rank for irrelevant searches.^[3] Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.^[4]

By relying so much on factors exclusively within a webmaster’s control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

While graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed “backrub”, a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links.^[5] PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.^[6] Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaining PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.^[7] In recent years major search engines have begun to rely more heavily on off-web factors such as the age, sex, location, and search history of people conducting searches in order to further refine results.

By 2007, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.^[8] The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.^[9][10] SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.^[11]