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There are volumes of information available for search engine optimization (SEO) techniques available. From forums, to books, to classes, and to general advice simply floating around. Terms such as white hat and black hat techniques, are often discussed as in the right way, or the fair way, or the way to gain a unique advantage. We often hear about link exchange, meta tags, and various other activities which may be part of an effective SEO strategy.
However before digging into the mechanics of what may or may not work to get your site at the top of the search engine results food chain, take a moment to step back and ponder this idea, what are the goals of the search engines themselves? They do have them you know, the search engines are not out there out of the goodness of their hearts. All of the major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, exist for one thing, to turn a profit for their owners and maintainers.
And how do they turn a profit? The same way that any other enterprise on the Internet does, the same reason you are likely interested in SEO in the first place, by driving traffic to their sites. What is the number one thing that will make a particular search engine popular with magnitudes of traffic? By ensuring the search results they provide are as accurate and complete as possible. To ensure the sites that display at the top of those results contain the very information you are searching for. When this is a achieved, your search provides useful results, more than likely you are going to the same place for your next search, and on and on. It is the primary reason Google is the most successful search engine today, and when it fails to work as expected the primary cause of frustration for the searcher.
There is often talk of Google "changing the rules" from time to time. Do you really think they do so to make things more challenging for SEO activities? Not at all, Google is continually changing their methods and algorithms towards one primary goal, to produce the most effective results. If you happen to be out searching for "blue widgets", search Google for the term, and the results come back with the most useful and complete information you are looking for, you are a happy camper.
Therefore you can rest assured, when the Google team are sitting in their design meetings, they are discussing the best way they can provide that type of result. They are required to keep improving their methods because the competition is continually doing the same in an effort to keep up and even surpass them as the most popular search engine. It is clearly in Google's or any other search engines best interest that when you do a search for "blue widgets" that you indeed find what you are looking for.
When taking the first steps towards SEO, if your site is in the market of selling blue widgets, you need to ensure that elements of your site make that absolutely clear. The premium way of doing that is to ensure the content of the site is indeed about blue widgets to a human visitor to your site. Content is very much the key, how many times have you found the information you were looking for by viewing page source to look at the keyword tags? Not very often I would guess unless you happen to be an over the top geek.
All of the elements such as URL, page title, description, link building, and the like are only methods to assist the search engine spiders. The most important thing is content. Without it, all the other things may return short term results but not the long term results you are likely to be looking for.
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