What more can I say about SEO? I’ve been puzzled, as have many people, as to the changes and variances in website rankings as well as many of the search results I’ve gotten. But to distill what I have seen and read lately into as concise a format as possible I had to make a short outline. The outline resulted in the following three areas: keywords, articles, and links.

KEYWORDS: Search Engine Spiders are still looking for keywords, but!!! keywords that occur naturally in the text of a website. In the past spiders looked for any keyword, even if it was buried in meaningless content. Nowadays a bunch of keywords peppering a page of useless content will not boost your ranking, and may in fact lower it.

Valid placement of keywords involves placing them in content, page titles and descriptions, and embedding them in HTML code in the form of Meta tags and alt tags that accurately describe what’s on the page. Spiders want to see titles and descriptions that direct a user easily to the information they need. These are the SEO methods that work now with major search engines like Google.

For search engine optimization, Denver businesses are going back to the natural way of presenting information on the web, natural is the buzzword of the moment.

ARTICLES: How much does article submission help your SEO? Article submission has been a popular SEO topic for quite a while. It is often used as a method to generate quality backlinks for a site. Some SEO experts will argue that writing an article for submission is a waste of valuable assets. They argue that quality content is better used on your own site. Perhaps the truth is really in between.

Great content on your site attracts natural links, and it also produces better search engine rankings in and of itself. But article submission can also produce both traffic and backlinks. Many people do not have the time or money to write great content for their own site as well as good content to give to others who will in turn link back to their site. But any strategy needs to consider both of these present time realities.

One way to accomplish this is to write two versions of an article. Put the more comprehensive and most articulate writing on your own website, but a shorter version can be written with very little more time expended for submission to other websites. The shorter article can be a tutorial or only an outline of the original version. Or the submitted version can take only the philosophic or esthetic viewpoint from the larger article. In fact the original article could be broken down to two or three smaller parts, or presented as a brief series.

If it is a well written, important or entertaining article, you will get traffic and natural links. Then submit the shorter versions to good websites in exchange for backlinks.

You can use one of the many content generator tools to modify your summary article into several other “versions�. But remember that content generators will not produce high quality articles, but they can make alternate versions of what you have already written, and which you can proof and improve.

LINKS: The discussion about linking strategies continues. It seems the algorithms are focusing on links that are related in a meaningful way to related and meaningful content. They also seem to focus on avoiding links with little relevance or that have lesser reputations (porn, casino, etc). These algorithms seem to prefer links with high status or acknowledged content expertise in a given field of content. And further, they prefer links with links with links to these high status websites.

Keepin’ It Real,
Arthur Browning