Unfortunately most webmasters and internet marketers fail miserably at managing their search engine presence and rankings. While it is true that Google and the other popular search engines go to great lengths to keep their algorithms and determining factors secret, it is not impossible to accurately predict, and even manage (to a certain extent) how you will be seen, and thus ranked by the search engines. Enter the billion-dollar industry of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is the practice of tailoring certain key elements of your websites to attract the interest of the search engine spiders, to increase your site’s perceived value, and to move higher in the ranks of search engine results. The methods that are used to accomplish this, although made to seem mysterious and difficult by a veritable legion of “gurus”, are surprisingly simple and can be broken down into the following categories. • Optimizing keyword density • Optimizing meta tags (Page Title, description, keywords) • Optimizing page-element arrangement • Obtaining backlinks Let’s take a short look at the first item, “Optimizing Keyword Density”. Now why do you suppose that I didn’t say what most SEO “experts” do? They will usually phrase it “Maximizing Keyword Density”, but that advice, while perhaps accurate in the past, is now worse than ineffective. The maximization methodology today will actually hurt your ranking, not help it. Keyword Density Optimization is really a very simple process. To put it succinctly, Keyword Density Optimization means “Not too much, and not too little:. Google has done something which is really a stroke of genius. They have calculated how often in normal human-authored writings a word will be repeated naturally when that word is the subject of the writing itself. If your site doesn’t have enough mentions of a given keyword, you get ranked lower because Google decides that your page is not really relevant for that keyword. Thus you wind up lower on the scale than someone which Google decides is more relevant, and thus a better resource for their customers (the web surfers searching for the term). If you want to learn more about search engine optimization, you can read about Saint Louis SEO. Saint Louis SEO offers great opportunities for your online business. If you want to have a high ranking in the search engine results Saint Louis SEO is the one for you.