A while back, maybe just 4 years ago or so all you needed to do to rank your site in a respectable position in the serps was to keyword focus your content. That's it, you could rank for anything you wanted (going back maybe more than 4 years now) just by having a high keyword density. Well, as soon as everyone figured that out guess what happened? Everyone started keyword stuffing their content and for a while it worked well.

You could just copy and paste a ton of keywords to your main index and bam! You ranked for lots of stuff. Then the search engines got wise to it so marketers had to be a little more clever. They started to hide their keyword stuffing by blending the text in with the background color completely. This stopped competitors from ratting other marketers out for a while.

The search engines once again got wise and it was decided to change the algorithm. Subsequently keyword density became a non critical factor. In fact all on page seo has become a non critical factor! Does on page seo still matter at all? Yes it does matter as every little thing you can do will help you to rank better and thus receive more traffic and money. However, on page seo is hardly critical to your site acheiving a good ranking. Links are the determining factor now.

There used to be a popular rumor that went something like this: create great content and it will attract the links. That's what people used to say about 'Organic' seo. You needed to create great content and somehow the links just appear. That could take 5 years!! Screw that! Who has the patience to wait that long when you can just create the links yourself and start receiving the benefits right away?

Now that internet marketers have figured out that links are the critical factor in determining your ranking in the serps, it has become somewhat of a science to figure out which links are more valuable than others. We now know that do follow links are better than no follow because they pass page rank juice. That's all fine and dandy but when you look at some of your competitors links they sometimes have thousands of them. How are you supposed to get thousands of links to a number of blogs and sites?

It all comes down to automating the linking process as much as possible. There are different levels of automation and some programmers create programs that will outright spam the internet for links. This creates problems for the spammer and the rest of us so it is not to be recommended. Spam isn't as effective as it used to be. A more acceptable level of automation exists in software like article submission software, social bookmarking software and directory submission software.

These types of software are the necessary tools of a professional internet marketer. You simply can't compete in today's world of internet marketing without tools such as these. Your competitors will eat you up and you'll never stand a chance. On the other hand though it's great to have the unfair advantage as I like to call it.