Savvy webmasters that understand the dynamics of their playing fields
are more likely to dominate their competition on the Internet. In order
to formulate a wise strategy a savvy webmaster must seek to
understand all of the dynamics that are at play and then strive to set
themselves apart from the competition.
In today’s online marketplace it is very easy to set yourself apart by
understanding what is going on with the search engines. The search
engines are competing for market share. They want as many eyeballs
on their index as possible to increase exposure for their advertisers
and increase their stock prices for their investors.
In order to maintain and increase their market share they have to
employ some drastic measures to ensure that when users conduct a
search on their index, that the most relevant results are displayed.
When users get relevant results they are more likely to return to that
index for future queries.
With this basic understanding in mind you have to consider that the
search engines must fight irrelevant content, spam content, duplicate
content and content designed for no other purpose than to draw clicks
to another site. There are so many things that the search engines are
actively combating that I could write an entire book on that subject
alone.
Rather than bore you with search engine combat tactics, algorithms
and theory, I will go deeply into tactics that are proven to be search
engine friendly and actually help the search engines in their quest for
relevance and overall user satisfaction.