I’m not sure if you’ve ever spoken with an “SEO expert” before or not. Pretty much, the idea of SEO has turned into its own profession, with many Internet marking people offering it as part of their consulting services. Many of them are lying cheats, who send mass emails to every company email address in the world promising to make their website number one with hundreds of keywords. Such a promise is impossible.

Google claims that they determine their page ranking off a few different aspects. Content is the number one thing they care about. Relevant content. They also like to see websites that are updated regularly (with your blog, that is a gimme). They pay a lot of attention to your H1 and H2 tags, then to your META title and META description tag. The META keyword tags supposedly have no value with Google, but other search engines may consider them. It’s a game however.

The thing of it is, and as you have experienced, Google owns the Internet, especially when it comes to search engines. Yahoo as number two is not even close. Bing (though new) is not even close. Anybody implementing SEO strategies does it for Google… and since Yahoo and AOL have similar standards, anything you do for Google generally applies to Yahoo and etc., though Google tends to be more conservative.

Basically, the art of trying to manipulate search engines has turned into a profession for some, and the good ones make a lot of money doing it (by saying the good ones, I mean the people are know how to B.S. and make you believe they can help you). There are some good SEO people out there, but there is no magic formula to make your site number one. A lot of it has to do with a few things you can do to your site, and a lot of luck.

Fortunately, the company I work for had a website that was already doing pretty good when I started. Since the task fell on me, I managed to not mess it up yet, thankfully.

Sorry for the long dissertation. You probably already know all this stuff anyways…