People are still writing keyword heavy articles, even thought the last meta tag website closed more than three years ago. Today, meta tags are predominantly used to help direct PayPerClick programs and pre sell the ads.



Search engines now rank websites based in inbound links, popularity, current posts. Today, content has two purposes. The first is to pre-sell visitors and help educate them, improving the chances of making a sale. There are several ways of doing this:

Online Courses

Chats

Forums

Blogs

Ebooks

Articles

The second method is to help search engines. However, today's search engines are more concerned with heading titles, meta descriptions, and sub heading titles than they are with the number of keywords found in the article. The search engines want one thing ?new content.?

Websites that do not update on a regular basis end up being dropped from the search engine queries ? no matter how many thousands they spent on SEO optimization. Search engines are looking for new content, daily if possible.

The search engines are also tracking whether visitors click into a site and leave, or whether they stay on a page for more than a few seconds, click to other pages in the site, and follow links in the site. This tells the search engines that users like the site, and find useful information on the site.

Forums

Currently, it appears that search engines are giving content in forums the highest ranking. Search almost any keyword term and forum links will come first, before the website content. This is why many websites are posting forums.

Much of the content in forum content is made up of articles, posted there to start a discussion. It takes a hard time to build an active forum and attract members. That is why some people artificially build the first few pages of their forums, to help get them started.

The benefit of forums is that your visitors write the content.

Blogs

The number one publishing method today is blogs. Anything can be posted on blogs: articles, reviews, opinions, news items, comments, etc.

Blogs have the advantage of being ?pinged? by blog search engines, which then alert the major search engines that new content is up. This puts the blog post at the top of the searches, but only for a few hours.

Another benefit to blogs is that you can create a blog community where visitors can post their content, or they can post comments to your blog posts. This interaction builds credibility, and it increases the interest level of the website.

Articles

The number one method of adding content to a website is through articles. These can be placed in a private, or a public place on the website. The main advantage is giving visitors something to read, something to pre-sell, and new content so the search engines will continue to rank the website.

Ebooks

Ebooks have two advantages. They can be opened up so Google can search then and bring people to the site who are interested in the content ? without letting the user read the whole ebook. This can be done by using a URL redirect.

The second advantage is that you have a product to give away or sell.

PowerPoint E-courses

PowerPoint E-courses are a great way to increase both the content, and the value of a website. They can either be sold, or they can be given away free. They can also be set up to be viewed by search engines.

Audio & Streaming Video

Audio and video files are great for visitor interest, but they offer very little SEO benefit. However, Audio can be submitted to its own feeds, search engines, increasing exposure. Video can be posted in YouTube attracting visitors.

These two mediums are very ?visitor? friendly, and have the added advantage of making the business owner ?real? to people surfing the net.