If you read some of the news on the internet, you would think that search engine optimization was dead. However, the truth is that website optimization is more important than it has ever been. There are a lot of techniques that webmasters have used in the past to get good rankings in the search engines. Over the last few years, Google have taken action against them, and many sites have either fallen down the rankings, or have been deinexed, which is a nice way of saying blacklisted.
The fact is, if no optimization is done to a website, then the search engines will have trouble reading it. So when it comes to ranking it, more than likely it will be filed under phrases that no one ever searches for. This is why one of the most important methods for optimizing a site is to make the topic of the site and each page, clear to both the reader and the search engines. This is just a case of using title tags, meta descriptions and using the keyword in the page address, and once or twice in the article.
The days of loading up a web page full of keywords are long gone, doing that is more than likely going to get a site penalized. If this happens to your main site, then it can be a very painful experience to say the least. It’s also not that easy to recover from a penalty.
Recent news from Matt Cutt’s of Google, states that keywords are no longer important, but that is unlikely to be true. Otherwise, his company would be ranking sites based on random phrases, and we know that is not true. Keywords are still important and optimizing your site properly is the best way to let Google know what your site should be ranked for.