by Brenna Mae

Created on: January 28, 2009   Last Updated: March 02, 2009

As search engines get smarter, you will have to as well. Back when SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was new, you could do the basics, and even get away with a few 'cheats' to get ahead in the search engine rankings. Today, however, search engine algorithms have become more intelligent to determine what websites are really the best out of the billions of websitse live today.

So how to you get ahead now? Here are the new ways to win over those algorithms, updated for the year 2009.

With all contemporary search engines, content is king. Content is what search engines can read, and it's what your visitors will appreciate and link to. That's the effect of great content.

A few great articles aren't going to cut it though. Visitors may find a way to your site, but what's going to make them enjoy your site once they get there?

If you have a lot of content, you have a lot of content for search engines to crawl. That's the technical side of it. On the other end, you have more content for your visitors to search through, and therefore have a liklier change of linkbacks and repeat visitors. This, of course, will increase your webpage ranking as well since search engines also look at traffic statistics.

Now don't take this advice to get a lot of mediocre content up quickly. It is still important to create useful, sticky content that your visitors will appreciate. Keep in mind that working up a strong library of content is going to take some time

With good content, you can join in on the next big thing. The new SEO marketing is content marketing. It's great for search engine optimization, in that it crawls the content on your site, and also on whatever sites you publish the content. This in return, creates linkbacks to you.

The big thing for SEO in 2009 is keyword density. This can give you a major jump in any search engine ranking, but you need to be careful so it doesn't seem like spam.

Sure, mention some keywords in your articles, blog posts, and especially in your about page, but don't do it so it sounds unnatural. A density to high in keywords can be caught by the search engines. Also, that's not very user-friendly, and your visitors will find your content hard to read.

Practice all the older forms of search engine optimization, but focus on these and the new year unravels. If you do this, you can quickly get ahead in the game.

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