Title: Search Engine Optimization Strategy ~ An Overview Word Count: 620 Summary: Web masters often feel like pulling their hair out and throwing a major childish tantrum when their search engine optimization strategy efforts don’t pay off. It is indeed maddening to find that SEO efforts that have cost so much time and energy have not borne anything fruitful. Has the search engine optimization work been done correctly, though? That’s the important question! There are SEO practices that are actually based on search engine optimization strategy misconce... Keywords: search engine optimization, seo, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization strategy Article Body: Web masters often feel like pulling their hair out and throwing a major childish tantrum when their search engine optimization strategy efforts don’t pay off. It is indeed maddening to find that SEO efforts that have cost so much time and energy have not borne anything fruitful. Has the search engine optimization work been done correctly, though? That’s the important question! There are SEO practices that are actually based on search engine optimization strategy misconceptions. Before embarking on another optimization attempt, web masters would find it worthwhile to read about the common SEO fallacies that one should correct so that SEO will not be wasted. Meta-tags and hidden text Web masters include the keywords in their meta-tags and this is standard practice. However, some web masters stop there. This is very bad practice! If a web master wishes to increase his or her pages’ relevance to a search engine queries, then the keywords should also be found on the pages themselves, not only in the meta-tags or codes. It is true that search engines see these keywords within the hidden coding of your website. But an important fact to bear in mind is that words within your page content, visible to readers are now more important than meta-tags. To compromise, some web administrators incorporate invisible keywords. These are called such because the human eye cannot decipher them. The texts’ color is similar to the background so they blend in with the background when the page is viewed. On the other hand, search engines still see this text so they count towards keyword relevance. However, what some web masters don’t realize is that these keyword phrases would have been a lot more valuable as keyword phrase anchor texts had they been visible. These anchor texts could have also linked to other pages in the site so that the relevance of the whole site is promoted. It is also pertinent to mention that hidden texts are borderline search engine optimization strategy for it is in fact fooling search engines to believe that the site is relevant to the query. In other words they could get your site banned from search engines!!! Web page design Some web masters focus so much on the elements of the web site to the exclusion of other offsite search engine optimization strategy aspects. It is true that a web site should have worthy content that has search engine optimized keywords in place. Keywords distributed in the content of the page increases its relevance to a search engine query in that keyword category. Pages that are aptly and keyword titled are also a very good way to improve the site’s ranking. Nevertheless, web masters should never believe that having very relevant and keyword-rich pages is the only way to increase page ranking. Search engines actually give much weight to link popularity in their search algorithms. A web administrator must therefore maintain appropriate keyword density but must also work towards improving link popularity through inbound links from other renowned web sites that have related content. Short-term SEO Some web masters think that once search engine optimization strategy measures are initiated, they should see the jump in page ranking immediately. This is the most common misconception about search engine optimization and this leads to unnecessary aggravation on the web masters’ part. Search engine optimization measures do not give instant returns; they take time, sometimes months, to work properly and give a web site’s rank a boost. Web traffic would eventually increase after search engine optimization strategy is set into motion. Meanwhile, web masters can save themselves so much frustration if they just wait for progress and find other means to increase traffic to their sites.