Copyright 2006 Mark Nenadic

Search engine optimization experts and SEO users are well aware of how competitive the search engine ranking world has become over the last few years. After all, the number of web pages that are being indexed by search engines every day has not only doubled or tripled, but has quadrupled itself over and over as the years go by. Furthermore, a growing number of the webmaster population is becoming familiar enough with search engine optimization techniques to begin to pose a threat to those sites making massive SEO campaigns.

Not too long ago, the majority of webmasters were unaware of the concept of SEO, and, for that matter, hadn't even considered search engines as a part of their marketing strategy over which they had any realistic control. Essentially, the only way to communicate with search engines that was understood at the time was placing keywords in the Meta tags of the webpagewhich had little to no real impact on the ranking when all was said and done. At that time, it too little to no effort to achieve very favorable search engine ranks in even the largest search engines. Even the more competitive areas were still within the realm of possibility for a new website.

Today, on the other hand, the opposite is true. Even when it comes to keywords and key phrases that nobody uses for searching can pose an obstacle for achieving a respectable search engine ranking unless you are extremely skilled with your SEO strategy. Even then, search engine rankings that may have been achieved one day may only be there for a single day, replace the next day by someone who has done something slightly better. The problem becomes that much worse when it comes to businesses with new websites. New websites see very few results using search engine optimization strategies. The older your website, the better its chances of seeing practical results from search engine optimization efforts. This is why it is important to consider your website a long term investment. The longer it's around, the better your chances of obtaining favorable search engine ranking.

At this point in the internet marketing industry, it is getting to the point that webmasters, website owners, and search engine optimization experts need to refocus their efforts on obtaining better targeted traffic that can be transformed into customers, instead of simply trying to grab at a great rank with any keyword at all. Unfortunately, most webmasters are still looking for short-term, instant results. This is something that today's search engines just aren't prepared to provide.

This is not to create the misunderstanding that search engine optimization has no value whatsoever. After all, achieving a #9 position is much more favorable than achieving the #57 spot. However, it simply means that those coveted top three spots should no longer be the single most important goal of the internet marketers who are using search engine optimization to help their results with search engines.

Instead, the focus of SEO efforts should be using the right keywords, instead of seeking the best space in the search results. It's time to see the big picture, instead of just the ranking that can be achieved for a twenty-four hour period, six months from now.

The trick is to make sure that the content in your website is of high quality. This means that it has interesting, usable information that is unique from everything else that is out there. It needs to be creative, practical, and well written. This means that rewriting your competitor's material is out of the question, and simply copying content from public domain articles is completely useless. You need to think about what your website is really about, and come up with your own unique angle and thoughts that will be interesting and useful to your readers. This is not at all easy, and may require the assistance of writing and web content professionals to get you started, but it should be considered a long-term investment that will be well worth your effort when you start to turn the traffic that you do have into a high percentage of new and returning customers. Remember, everybody out there is trying to snatch up all of the 'best' keywords and churning out fast content to get those phrases used the most. You need to make your site different by using great keywords, but placing them within exceptional content that will actually keep the visitors that you achieve.