In the SEO World 2009 is Almost 1999!

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

There’s no doubt that the practice and industry of search engine optimization has undergone some changes in the last ten years. What was important in 1999 is not necessarily still important today. Though, in many respects, the basics that are important for on site optimization, still remain just as important today.

In 1999, meta tags were extremely important. Today, they’re only moderately so. Keywords in your URL fluctuate from a point of major importance to minor importance from year to year. But keyword positioning in the title of your page has grown in importance from moderately high to very high. With link building, link exchanges and Google page rank chasing used to be all of the craze in the SEO world, but it is not effective these days. Still, can we say definitively that there is one aspect of on site optimziation that is of supreme importance in SEO and should not be left out? I think so!

Based on my years of SEO and internet marketing experience (and of course, many other SEO folks in the industry would agree!) The most important aspect of on site optimization is the same as it was today as it was in 1999…drum roll, please! CONTENT! You guessed it, good quality, goal and user focused content is the king of all SEO efforts. If you content is not well written with your goals in mind, without call to actions, without a clear direction any visitors that you happen to achieve through your SEO and search engine marketing efforts are wasted. The bottom line is write your content for humans, your visitors coming to your website and optimize it naturally and you should be in good shape!