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’90s, SEO was simple. You added a few meta tags to your website, and made sure your content was peppered with keywords at a high percentage. Just repeating keywords was once enough to draw traffic. This was back in another era when spider technologies were relatively new, and when website visitors were OK with simple matches that approximated the information they were seeking.

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.

The speech patterns Google and others have started extracting from literature, news reports, and online sources have been incorporated into their algorithm. The new algorithms will exact a heavy penalty on your sites if you stuff keywords. Page rankings can disappear if you add too many keywords. Website owners once would stuff a page with 7% keywords, but in 2009, 3 to 4% keyword content is optimal. More than 3 to 4% keywords looks unnatural to the search engine, even if the content is not spam, in fact, even if it is original and unique on the net.

The top SEO strategy in 2009 is to make copy that is keyword optimized, but reads naturally. Copy should not just house keywords; it should also be appealing to the reader. Keyword-rich external links, however, are still important, and you still need to keep your keyword density up to 3 or 4%. Maintain a natural flow of meaningful text with just enough keywords and Google with reward you with higher page rankings.

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.

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