In an earlier post I discussed how the business of building websites has changed over the years. Believe it or not, there was a time when it was enough to put up a few pages, do your best to get the word out, and hope for the best. As business on the web has exploded, the whole process has gotten more sophisticated and grown exponentially more complex.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have removed any barriers to making great looking sites on the web. The only thing holding you back now is your level of creativity. Usability has gone from being an obscure concept to a vital component of any successful website. What can be more important than ensuring that you are able to close the deal by giving your users exactly what they want–quickly and easily?

Search Engine Optimization has changed dramatically from the early days of the web as well. For the uninitiated, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines (like Google, Yahoo, or Bing) via search results. SEO is done “organically” by controlling certain tags and aspects of a site’s architecture. Because some of these “under the hood” aspects of a website can be the difference between a few sales an a lot of sales, site owners should be aware of their importance.

I titled this post “Today’s Search Engine Optimization” because things have changed so much from just a few years ago. There was a time when meta data and keywords were very important in returning a website a high ranking on the Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs. Unfortunately it was effective to spam tags with keywords that had nothing to do with the actual content of the site, and this lead to widespread abuses. Keywords and meta data have been rendered all but valueless nowadays.

When the shift in the way search engines ranked sites came, something needed to fill the void left by the exit of keywords and meta data. A new mantra came to describe how to optimize your site: Content is King.

In Part 2 of this post I will look at ways to optimize the content on your site, and what tags behind the scenes catch the eye of those all powerful search engines.