Search Engine Optomization is a simple concept in and of itself. You design your site in such a way that search engines understand your content and can index you appropriately.
The more common usage of the term, however, is slightly less vague: Make the search engines rank you for keywords that you are targetting.
Can you really make the search engines do what you want? Given time, money, and focused effort, yes. And certainly there are many people out there that do exactly that. Am I one of those people? Yeah, right. There aren't a lot of people or businesses for that matter that have that much power - and those that do are not sharing. They also probably will not have long term success with their rankings because large scale manipulation and manipulation in high traffic areas are sure to trigger a response from the search engines.
When you are thinking about Search Engine Optomization, think small scale. Think focused effort. Think realistically. The SEO market changes dramatically and without notice. If you plan on relying just on SEO techniques for a site's success, or for sustenance, you are in for a long, arduous, and painful journey.
It's important to understand the nature of the beast before attempting to tame it. Once you understand it's nature, you can develop your own short term and long term strategies for success. Always remember that SEO is just one weapon in a webmaster's toolkit. Visitor experience is much more important. What good are 100,000 visitors if they leave your site after 30 seconds and never come back?
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