Over the last few years, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has undergone some drastic changes with people scrambling in panic as they saw their rankings drop on Google. But it’s really not that bad over all.

While there are people who had their websites lose their rankings on Google, some website owners didn’t and the amazing thing is that their websites actually moved up the search engines. So, what gives? Well, the website owners that surfed on Google’s changes rather than drowned in them understood something that other website owners didn’t. They understood the basics. And what are these basics in SEO? Read below to know.

Google, Yahoo and Big are search engines and earn their money by providing relevant content to people who are searching for specific things online. Thus, no matter what you do (and no matter what black hat SEO marketers are saying), great content will always remain king. Thus, whatever you do, always build content that is relevant to your website. Publish great relevant content and publish it often, because one factor in the algorithm of search engines is how often a website updates its content and how relevant the content is.

Ideally, you should be publishing three posts per day. If that seems a lot, it is, especially if you’re maintaining hundreds of websites.

But really, you don’t have to write your own content. You can curate content or get content from other websites (text, pictures and videos) and then add a few paragraphs here and there while linking to the source of your content. Curating content has proven to be an effective method of getting the search engines to spider your content.

Because of some changes in Google’s algorithm, some people have dismissed back links as useless in getting ranked. But this thought is counterproductive. Back links still do matter, however, rather than quantity, the quality of the links matter more. Links from websites that are related to yours (for example, an information website on forex trading linking out to a review site on forex robots) will always count, no matter what so-called SEO experts might say.

Another factor that Google is taking into consideration is your user experience. If your website visitors are staying on your website, doing things here and there, that will help in getting your websites ranked.

A profile on Google plus one will not hurt either. Simply create a Google Plus account and link it to it from your website. Make sure that you set the relationship of the link to “author”, because it will show to Google that you are a real person.

In all, SEO is something that you consider doing if you want to make Internet Marketing seriously. Website that are ranked are Google benefit from becoming a trusted website. Thus, when you get ranked on Google, it will be easier to recommend products to people.

Even with Google’s Panda and Penguin updates some things have not changed and these basics will never change for as long as search engines remain search engines.

The golden egg to marketing is targeted traffic. Targeted advertising is when your marketing efforts reach the actual people you are going after. Newspapers, radio, television and similar advertising are not really targeted because they basically cast a wide net and will get some people you are interested in. There are things they can do to make it more targeted like advertising a sporting goods store on a sports talk radio station, but there is a more targeted method and that is using the Internet and search engine optimization.

Search engines are the sites we go to find things on the Internet. The popular ones include Google, Yahoo and Bing. There are other ones out there, but those three are, by far, the biggest. And, Google is perhaps the king of those three.  Search engine optimization is the practice of creating a website in a manner that helps the search engines read the site and understand what it is about and how to rank it on certain terms. So, if you want to rank on the term “poodles for sale” then you tailor your web page around that term.

That is a simple explanation of what SEO is, but it is much more complicated than that. There are many steps to properly optimizing a site. And, there is a thin line to walk too. If you over optimize or try to hard you can actually trip a wire in the search engines algorithm where they know they are being manipulated and may exclude you completely from their results. This is known as gaming the search engines. The makers of the search engines like for websites to grow organically and naturally. They do not like to think that people are doing unnatural things to help their sites rank fast. However, due to the competitive landscape, this is just not the case. There has been a whole cottage industry created around helping websites rank in the search engines.

This mainly has to do with the targeted advertising mentioned earlier. If someone has a plumbing problem, goes to Google and types in “affordable plumber in Chicago”, and your site shows up in the first position then you have a really good shot at getting a phone call. That is the epitome of targeted advertising.  People recognized this long ago and ever since then have been trying to manipulate their sites to rank on all manner of keywords and phrases. Thus, SEO was born.

Proper SEO, however, takes patience and lots of time. You need content for the search engines to find. You need links pointing to your site so the search engines understand that your site is one that needs to be paid attention to. You need proper keyword research to make sure you are ranking on words that have merit. You want to rank on words that have high search volume because if you rank on words no one is searching for there is no point in all the effort. As you can see, there is a lot of work that needs to be done with SEO, but the results can be amazing.

If you have been working on your search engine optimization efforts, chances are that you have been focusing on your keywords. While keywords are important, that’s just part of the story. In order for your SEO efforts to really take off, you need something else: backlinks.

What are backlinks? Simply, they are links that lead back to your site that are placed on other websites. Search engines consider that to mean that other sites view you as an authority on your topic, and rank you more highly because of it. The more backlinks you have, the better you will do in the search engine results listings.

There are ways for you to get backlinks. One way for you to get backlinks is for you to buy backlinks. This is a really easy way to get backlinks, and it is usually a quick way to do it as well. However, there are some problems with that approach. For one thing, it is hard for you to monitor the quality of the sites that your links end up on. For instance, a link to your heavy metal blog might show up on a site for children’s toys. Search engines are starting to change their algorithms to stop ranking sites well when that is happening. Not only that, but if you buy backlinks you may not see results and have trouble recouping that loss from the person you bought backlinks from.

A popular way to get links back to your site is to do article marketing or guest blogging. For both these methods, what you need is to be able to write content that is appropriate for other people to post on their website. If you write an article on pet dogs, for instance, you can ask another site owner if they will post it on their dog site.

Then, people who read the other site will read your piece and click through to your site. It’s a great way to get new traffic, but it’s also great for SEO. If you put a link to your site in the “about the author” section, there is one authentic backlink.

If you want to get truly creative, insert a relevant link within your article as well. That way, you will have two backlinks.

Another way to get backlinks is to get them the old fashioned way. Write interesting content and provide relevant information to your target audience, and you’ll find that people start sharing your links and posting links to your site without any prompting from you. This can take time, but these kind of high-quality backlinks are just the thing that search engines are looking for.

Backlinks are a major part of any SEO operation. When you are able to get people to link back to you, the search engines understand that to mean that you know what you’re doing. If you work consistently at a good backlink plan, your efforts are going to pay off after a while.

Keywords are always talked about when people want to get SEO, or search engine optimization done. That’s why you need to understand how to use them and what they really mean.

First of all, what is a keyword? A keyword is the word or words that someone would type into a search engine search box. For instance, if someone wanted to find out about the nearest pet store, they would likely type into the box “pet store” along with their zip code. People enter in thousands of keywords a day, so there are always a few keywords for any topic you might be involved with.

The reason that these keywords are important, is that the search engines send out crawlers or spiders to find them in websites around the Internet. These “spiders” or “crawlers” are merely bits of code that the search engines use to figure out which sites are relevant to certain keywords.

The more relevant a site is to a keyword, according to the search engine’s algorithm, the higher the site will be in the search engine’s results pages. Keywords are just one piece of this algorithm, but they are an important piece.

Therefore, if you want to work on improving your site’s rank in the search engine listings, you need to work on incorporating keywords into your website content. This can be done fairly easily, once you know which keywords you want to use, and come up with quality content to put on your site.

How do you know which keywords to use? You can use your common sense. For example, if you want to sell pencils, the keyword dogs may not be a good one to use. There are some keyword research tools out there which can help you figure out some more creative keywords to use. The tools can also help you know what people are actively searching for.

Once you have the keywords you want to use, you have to create the content of your site. Or, if you have good keywords, you can just insert them into the content you’ve already written. The key is to make your content natural and keyword rich. Some beginners tend to do “keyword stuffing”, which basically means making content unintelligible by adding nothing but keywords. Remember, people have to read your content too.

Content is not the only place you can use keywords. You can also include keywords in your site’s meta-tags, and you can also make sure that you label all your pictures using keywords. After all, people do image searches as well, and you can sometimes place higher in those results because a lot of people don’t realize that picture titles are also indexed by the search engines.

Finding out about keywords is an essential part of good SEO. Without them, you are not going to be able to mount an effective SEO campaign. Luckily, after reading this article, you should be able to better understand how good keywords can help you and bring you the traffic you want.

If you are looking for a highly targeted and effective way to promote your business or product then you should strongly consider building a website and using SEO to rank the site. SEO, or search engine optimization is the practice of ranking websites on specific terms within the search engine results. It is targeted traffic that can capture searchers when they have their wallets in their hands looking for a product or solution to their problem. No other form of advertising has the targeted power that SEO can have. Most other forms of advertising have the business person looking for customers. With SEO, the roles are reversed and the customer is looking for the business.

SEO is not a onetime process either. It is not something you do once, get your ranking and then maintain the rankings in perpetuity. It requires maintenance and ongoing work to keep the rankings. Otherwise, your competitors will do what they need to do in order to outrank you. It is an ongoing game that requires work and diligence, but is well worth it in the long run.

You can do the work on your own. But, you need to understand it takes a good deal of research and work to get started. And, as stated, it will take ongoing work to maintain the rankings once you attain them. If you are short on capital then that may be the best avenue to take. And, if you need free advertising because you are low on capital then, again, it can be a good alternative. It just needs to be understood that it takes time.

Alternatively, you can hire SEO consultants to take care of the work for you. The upside of this is they can do all the work for you to attain your rankings while you focus on doing the things it takes to run your business. It frees up your time, basically. The downside is that it costs money to hire them. And, since it is ongoing, it will be a fee you will have to pay to maintain these rankings. Many SEO consultants will offer monthly maintenance plans to help you maintain your rankings. They will usually set this based on how many words you are trying to rank on.  It is a good idea to stay away from agencies that say they guarantee number one rankings. Since no one knows exactly how the search engine algorithm works it is hard to guarantee that. Plus, they may be doing things to get high rankings that you do not want being done to your site.

SEO is by far the most targeted form of advertising available. Being able to build something that attracts customers puts the business in control. They can then concentrate on other areas of their business while the prospects come searching for them. It means they no longer have to go out and actively seek customers unless they want to do that. It can replace all forms of advertising for some. And, for others, it can be a great supplement to their current marketing efforts.