Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is without doubt the most important thing any website can invest in, and every year the methods of effective SEO become more advanced and more specific. The search engines are constantly reinventing themselves, moving forward to become pickier about sites that may be spam, and far more accurate in matching the content they deliver to the specifics of user queries. Every website owner needs to review SEO strategies every year to make sure they are still the best available.

In the’90s, SEO was simple. You added a few meta tags to your website, and made sure your content was peppered with keywords at a high percentage. Just repeating keywords was once enough to draw traffic. This was back in another era when spider technologies were relatively new, and when website visitors were OK with simple matches that approximated the information they were seeking.

Up to and into 2009, search engines have worked tirelessly to make their searches much more accurate, and Google is the best example of that. Their original algorithm gave much more weight to back-link counting and prioritizing. That means that you would get more credit for a link to your website from a well respected website than one that was just created, and that the more links you had of high value, the better you?d perform in search results. Additionally, keyword anchor text for those links would optimize your site for specific keywords through links.

Keyword-rich links from well-respected external sites is still the best way to get visitors from Google. What’s new is that Google has been working night and day to develop more natural heuristics to discern quality content. No longer absolutely requiring websites to win popularity contests by building up external links, Google has begun to use natural language filters. These filters discern if the text flows as if it written from writer to reader without concern for keywords, or if it is keyword-heavy or even spam.

Certain language patters appear in literature, in news reports, and in countless other sources online. Google and other engines have started distilling these word patterns and integrating them into their algorithms to rule out websites that are clearly keyword stuffing. This makes quality content a lot more valuable than it once was. Website owners once could optimize a page by stuffing it with a 7% keyword density. Nowadays, a 3 to 4% keyword density is optimal. More is not better. If keyword density looks unnatural to a search engine, it will reject the page, even if it is not spam.

The top strategy for search engine optimization in 2009 is still to write useful copy with keyword optimization, combined with back-links to high page-rank sites with carefully chosen anchor text. Just avoid getting greedy. Keyword optimization that does not overreach with great user-friendly content will be the way to keep your page rankings high in 2009.

Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.

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