Ten years ago – quite a long time if you think abut it in the fast moving online universe - webmasters made their websites look “sexy” - remember all those cheesy animated gifs, follow me cursors, and even today the animated flash which may take a long time to load even with high speed Internet access.

At the same much search engine optimization (SEO) was what would be called black hat SEO today (I believe those webmasters who used packing their pages with hidden keywords (same color as background, tiny etc) just imagined they were being clever. I don't know. I knew about it but decided against it.

My own feeling has always been write for the reader and damn the torpedoes or is it the spiders....

SEO has always been a cat and mouse game between the search engines and the webmasters. There is a fine line between good SEO (whitehat) and unfair cheating SEO (blackhat). There is some gray areas (grayhat?). My suggestion is to be upfront and only use total whitehat SEO as the search engine algorithms will get better and better all the time and writing for your audience will in the long run pay (but then I love writing and would do it most of the time if money was no objection)....

In this game of cat and mouse the early days of widespread Internet (as opposed to the days on Internet being at ARPA, DARPA and a few top universities) the blackhat SEO experts may have had an advantage.....

and the search engine algorithms became more intelligent.

The purpose people use search engine may be best answered by four questions:  

1. Why do people use a search engine?
   To find information.
   
2. Does any information do?
   Searchers desire relevant information.
   
3. Will the same ol - same ol information do?
   People search for different information from different web sites - hence the duplicate content penalty, where search engine do their best to only show one version (the first spidered) of duplicate content.
   
4. Why is Google the top search engine?
   It’s the best in answering the above questions. Also by now people believe it's the best - branding.
   

SEO has two aspects:

1. Mechanical aspects like meta-tags, robot.txt, sitemap.xml – I’ll write about these later on.
2. Content itself.

Good content is written for human readers while making the task of the spiders (robots or spiders are the programs which index the Internet filling up the search engine database) easier so the search engine can serve the best page (ideally yours) for any given search.

There a good writer knows selects the  keywords the content aims to explain and automatically places some of those near the beginning and so on.

However, I believe worrying about keywords too much will make your articles less readable for your audience and as I mentioned the search engines are becoming more intelligent daily and  notice all types of unnatural keyword stuffing and will penalize it like they penalize duplicate content.

So the best choice is to write well in you own personal style and in the long run you'll get the search engine position and visitors you deserve.

Earlier I wrote that print authors have recycled their content since the invention of writing and savvy Internet marketers do the same.

This is an example of doing so, To see the original article go to: "King Content" at newbie Internet Marketing blog.