Search Engines use algorithms that are well protected intellectual proprietary secrets and are continually evolving over time. It is important for you to focus on making your website as accessible as possible to Search Engines, while ensuring you have high quality content. Keep in mind these are well-established principles that are guaranteed to improve the rankings of your website, regardless of how the Search Engine algorithms continue to advance.

Search Engine Optimization practitioners can sometimes try to abuse the Search Engine algorithms in order to give their clients an advantage, and at times they might look to benefit and improvement through loopholes or sometimes shady methods. One simple example is using invisible text (white text on a white background) to “stuff” a page. Of course, this is invisible to the human eye, but Search Engines used to index this content, and if it is taken one-step further by stuffing the page even more with unrelated (but popular) keywords, it then becomes ‘spamming’. That was then, this is now and Search Engines are much smarter today and will definitely notice these sneaky tricks, and will heavily penalize any websites using such tactics and tricks.

Advanced Optimization is not simple and therefore carries risk if badly planned and executed. You should always keep in mind that what might work today is innovative, but runs the risk of heavy penalties in the future once people abuse it to the point where results are skewed, so always be careful of the introduction of any initiatives that fall into this class.

You probably have the question in mind that if you apply Search Engine Optimization management to your website, how long before you see the results? Understand that Google re-indexes websites every single day of the year, and it follows a process to ensure every entry contained in its vast database is re-indexed every 4-6 weeks. Google will also re-index sites like “news” aggregators much quicker, many times daily in order to stay most current. You can be sure that other Search Engines use roughly the same re-indexing timeframes, and therefore expect it to take up to 4-6 weeks before you can observe changes in the rankings.

You are still probably wondering if Search Engine Optimization will improve your ranking. Yes, but will they keep you there? No. Understand the Search Engine algorithms always continue to evolve over time and Search Engine Optimization is a form of marketing, and you therefore must have clearly defined processes of monitoring, interpreting results and tweaking.

Remember, Search Engine Optimization is not the only tool you need when creating and maintaining a profitable web presence, it is only one important component of your Web marketing strategy. Seasoned Web Marketers understand and realize that there is more to the Web than just search engines, as they know obtaining links from reputable websites, mixed with advertising using traditional media and ensuring your customers recommend you to their network of friends enjoy the same level of importance.

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I think I’m safe in saying that anyone who operates a website wonders how to get it into the top 10 search results, and that one thought has created an industry with the tools and knowledge to answer this very question, and the process has come to be known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Many say that SEO methodology has become more of an art employed to bring improvement to the ranking of a website in Search Engine results given certain targeted “keywords,” and I tend to agree with that consensus. You need to understand that “keywords” are the words or phrases that your target market uses most to limit search results to more specific sites including product or services that you might offer. To illustrate, you might want your website to rank high for “Disc Golf accessories,” but you couldn’t care less if it rates high for “Garden Supplies,” because that is NOT your target market niche.

Most people of course don’t realize that Search Engines are actually very limited software programs, which don’t have the intelligence built into them to understand everything they encounter on the Web. What they use is constantly evolving rules to score and rate a website’s capability to answer a very specific question, and now that we understand this knowledge, we can break down the Search Engine Optimization process into the following three categories:

HTML code: This is the part of Search Engine Optimization for programmers, since an in-depth knowledge and understanding of web coding standards and techniques is required, and typical software packages have historically produced poor results which take a lot of the human touch and intervention to ensure optimum results.

Tailoring the Content: When given a set of keywords, a Search Engine rates pages according to their respective relevancy, so that you have to build your content with those specific keywords always in mind. What is fundamental to determining just which keywords are relevant is a complete understanding of your target market niche, including knowledge of the typical questions they ask when searching for answers. Is important for you to know and understand there are websites (i.e. www.wordtracker.com, www.google.com/insights/search, etc.) dedicated to helping you determine the most commonly used keywords, and you should make extensive use of them.

Keep in the back of your mind throughout the process, that this is not a race of numbers to see how many keywords you can fill the page with, because there is an optimum keyword density. Too dense with too many keywords and it will be considered spamming, and you will most certainly be penalized. Too little, and you are neither ranked nor considered an authoritative source of information. It would be wise of you to dial in on a specific set of keywords, and remember you are trying to optimize for only those asking a specific question.

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Even though five years can fly by relatively fast, in Web time five years can be like centuries with the rapid advances and changes that have occurred, particularly in the world of blogs since 2005, a year that saw a lot of significant startups and developments including YouTube and the foundations of blogging.

Since then sites have been created, sites have faded and died, while other sites have grown up and effectively changed with the latest waves in technology and market trends. Completely new blogging formats and platforms have been born and business empires grown from the simple foundations of the humblest of blog beginnings.

The blogging world we know today is more diversified than five years ago, but only a relatively few number of blogs have risen to the position of domination across the new media landscape. In addition, the blogging world of today is powered and influenced in many ways by Social Media which was just starting its infant stage five years ago and barely an afterthought in anyone’s mind at the time.

A look back at the last five years in the blogging world might help us better understand the future world of blogging.

Midway through 2005 the world of blogs grew to over 14 million and growing at a strong clip of approximately 80 thousand new blogsites each and everyday, come rain or shine. In 2005 most of the new bloggers “journaled” mostly random thoughts and boring clichéd entries, and transitioned the blog world to one that now supports a growing number of rapidly escalating media empires, each unique in their own ways.

Today, as you might know, blogging has entered the mainstream of the Web consciousness and proven to be a legitimate source of media, reprogramming how people throughout business and industry think about blogs with a much greater understanding and respect, although the vast majority of blogs are still likely to be personal in nature, which is not to say their reader traffic is small as some enjoy several million each month.

According to the 2009 State of the Blogosphere report by Technorati, professional bloggers are blogging more than ever, while hobbyists are blogging less, even with 133 million blogs and counting, and we strongly suspect that Social Media has something to do with the trend.

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The retention of childlike attributes in adulthood is becoming much more important with the development of social media technology, and the quick adaptation of people of all ages to social networking as the main method of remaining connected with their networks or social graphs. Human beings are younger longer than any other creature on earth, taking almost twenty years until we become adults. While we retain many our childlike attributes into adulthood, when most of us stop playing as we become adults and focus on work, we also lose our creativity and any abilities to think outside the box, a trend to nurture and continue to grow creative and innovative abilities has been building for the past decade as part of the Social Media (R)evolution.

When we are young, we learn, we connect, we socialize, we build strong relationships, we play, we experiment, we are curious, we feel wonder, we feel joy, we change, we grow, we imagine, we hope, we dream, we create, we care, and our life spirit is strong.

In adulthood, we are serious, we work, we are logical, we reason, we produce, we focus, we fight, we protect, and we believe in things strongly.

The future of the global economies is becoming less about being efficient, producing more stuff and protecting our respective turf and more about building strong relationships and connections, working together, embracing change and being creative, being curious, feeling wonder, hoping, dreaming, and keeping our life spirit strong. We live in an age where people starve in the very midst of abundance and the greatest enemy we have, has become ourselves, rejecting any change, with our own testosterone driven urge to control our beliefs, our territories and our environments at all costs, and the detriment to the future of all.

It’s time we think and listen with the openness of children, and allow the spirit and vision of youth to guide us beyond the rigid frameworks and dogma created by adults, and rekindle the flame and passions we need now more than ever.

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