Back in the day – only ten years or so ago – the term SEO hadn’t been invented. In those days Google’s spiders were far less sophisticated than they are today and the way to get to the top of Google was to have pages full of a single keyword or keyword phrase, and the more of them the better.SEO is a critical business tool

So if you were selling mince pies you would have the words “mince pies” all over pages in your website and in blogs as many times as possible, and looking different. For example, mince pies, MINCE PIES, mince pies, Mince pies, mince PIES – you get the idea. The trouble was that the page or article would look like utter rubbish and read appallingly badly, but Google didn’t care. It would send out its’ crawlers and they would find this page and think to themselves “Ah, this is all about mince pies. Great. We’ll put it at the top.” So when people searched for mince pies, that was the page that they found.

However, even Google began to realize that this was ridiculous, and in February 2011 introduced its’ Panda change to its algorithms, which did away with these nonsense pages and forced people to write articles in sensible English. Today, Google has become far more sophisticated, and it wants to see top quality pages and articles using terms that people search for, so the keywords have to be just that in order for a website or blog to get on page 1.

This Is Why SEO Is So Important

This is why search engine optimization, or SEO, is so important today. It is the process of altering a website, blog, article, and so on, so that it conforms to Google’s latest algorithms. The problem is partly that Google keeps changing and altering them, which is why you now need an SEO consultant in San Francisco, California.

Now in case you hadn’t spotted it, that was a long-tail keyword: SEO consultant in San Francisco, California. This article is promoting one of the things that I do for my clients, so when they search for “SEO consultant in San Francisco, California” I want my page to be at the top of Google. Go ahead: give it a go.

However, SEO is about a lot more than just inserting a keyword. There has to be the right balance, and the article has to be interesting and about the keyword. Then there are variations on keywords – for example, San Francisco SEO consultant, because somebody might search for that instead. Websites need to be optimized. Articles need to be useful to the searcher, and a whole lot more besides.

However, when you are successful with SEO and you get to the top of Google, it is free advertising, and who doesn’t want that? But you DO need to be on page 1, because only 10% of searchers ever go on to page 2. My job is to get you on to page 1.