Search engine optimization (SEO) has been a guessing game for several years now. Search engines have become much more sophisticated as newer and newer technologies became available and the competition increased for providing the best search results.

Black hat webmasters, the bad guys, took advantage of search engine robots with keyword spamming of various types. Meta tags were inundated with more and more keywords and keyword phrases. Search engines like Google changed their search algorithm on a regular basis and kept it secret, and I’m talking secret! That didn’t stop everyone from guessing how to beat it.

Some search engines quit reading most, if not all, meta tags. Keyword spammers were detected and BANNED. Search engines began to rely less and less on what webmasters said about their sites.

Content Became King

Good relevant site content is still king. And, of course, there is a way to optimize content for the search engines. Articles and title tags should contain the primary keyword for the page being created. Heading tags should be used to emphasize keyword-related sections of the page. Bold text should be used to emphasize keyword-related words. Most of all, however, the content should provide value to the reader.

Linking Became the King’s Assistant

Since search engines quit relying on webmasters to provide accurate information about their content, the robots began looking to see if others liked the content. Do other sites link to the page? Of course, more black hat strategies were designed such as link farms, and link farms soon became irrelevant to search robots. Posting the same article in as many places as possible with a link back to the website became a common practice, and search robots began penalizing sites for duplicate content.

If you think you can beat the search engines, listen to this: you can’t!

Social Media Linking

Many of the BIG social media sites use no follow tags, and that means that the search robots do not even read the link. Google disapproves of the practice of using the rel=nofollow attribute for the purpose of not sharing PageRank, yet many bloggers use it to "protect their blog PR". Matt Cutts recently blogged about a change in Google’s algorithm that although no PageRank and anchor texts are passed through such links, they are counted when sharing the outgoing link juice. The only difference is that it’s neither passed to the linked site nor kept on the page, according to the folks at Web CEO.

Directory Links

The Internet has a lot of web directories and blog directories. Some use no follow tags or make you pay for the link, neither of which is beneficial to you. Other web directories allow you to link only to your home page while still others allow deep linking to any page on your site. Dozens of these directories (over 100) can be found in the eBook, How to Generate Free Traffic. I’ve already written about this eBook. You can read a review by clicking How to Generate Free Traffic.

Links from Article Directories

Article directories provide another avenue for generating links to your site – within the rules of the particular directory. Some of the lesser known directories allow you to post deep-linking articles. Just remember that you should never post an affiliate link in an article you are submitting to a directory. The primary purpose of posting the article is to generate link juice back to your site. Directories like Reciprocal Links Directory allow deep links and do not use no follow tags. It does require a reciprocal link from your site.

How to Improve Your Site’s Relevance

I’ve already mentioned content should be your major focus. Next on your list should be building links. You should comment on blogs that have articles related to your site content and link back to your relevant page. Of course, you must then hope the blog owner is a good person and approves your comment.

Find related sites and secure a link exchange with the site owner. Many webmasters fail to do this because it takes time and effort with no guarantee of results. There is a resource called Value Exchange where you can put information about your site. The program then searches for related sites and lists them for you. You can then automatically contact those webmasters who have also signed up for the free link exchange program and work out the details of an exchange.

Links from similar, related sites can do a lot to improve your linking strategy.

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