Years ago, it was common practice to cram as many keywords into a website as humanly possible. The more keywords resulted in a higher ranking on search engines. The problem with this was that many top ranked websites had little to no valuable content for the web user. As a result, these websites would seldom get return traffic. So, the search engine that was meant to put the most valuable websites on the top of the results page was failing to do its job.

Well, not anymore!

These days search engines are smarter and better at sifting through the keyword dense junk to find the truly valuable content. Now if you want to rank high you have to cater to the web user, NOT the search engines. Because what the search engines do, really, is cater to web users. So if YOU cater to web users and the search engines cater to web users, then it would only make sense that your website would rank higher.

How to avoid keyword spam

Having keywords on your website is not a bad thing, actually it's a very important part of good SEO, but those keywords are meaningless without good quality original content to back them up! There's no formula for how many keywords you should have or what the limit is. Instead of focusing on quantity, focus on quality.

Ask yourself:

• Is my content useful?
• Is my content original?
• Is my content updated on a regular basis?

For a higher ranking, you should be able to answer YES to all three questions. If you're answer is NO to at least one, then you have some work to do.

As a web user coming to your website, if I found your content helpful and up to date I would keep coming back. In the eyes of the search engines, that would make your website valuable, ranking you higher so that other users can benefit from your website, as I have. So remember – quality over quantity! After all, what's the point of reaching more potential clients if you're going to lose them anyway due to a lack of useful information?

Want more info on this topic? Here's some links to check out:

• http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research
• http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-seo-best-practices-part-13/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk4qgQdp2UA
• http://www.google.ca/trends/ (A useful resource to gain an idea of the search volume for particular terms)

Disclaimer:

Once you've poured your heart and soul into your content, and it's bursting at the seams with your expert knowledge, you publish it to your website. You wait an hour and to your shock and disappointment, your website is not ranked number one yet! Why not? Well, like all good things in life, it takes time. What's that saying? Rome wasn't built in a day. The same goes for your SEO.

Because there are millions of websites out there (yours being just one of them), there is no way to guarantee that your website will jump to number one immediately, or stay at number one forever! Everyone else who has a website is also trying to be ranked as high as possible (which, if successful, could bump your ranking down).

So, just remember to keep working at it. The better your SEO practices, the better chance your website has of standing out from the million others.

To view the original article, visit the Lone Wolf blog.