It is time to get your crystal ball out. The internet is moving 1000 miles per hour and you may feel like your business is going more like 10 m.p.h. How you got traffic to your website in the past is not the best way to do it today. This really forces all of us to step back and look at where our online business is heading this year. If you do not like what you see you still have time to change your course.

Search engine marketing is still something we all think of. Google still seems to be the leader of the pack with Yahoo, MSN and the others still lagging behind. So when you look at what you are doing with your website and blog you have to consider the question, “what will Google think about this?”

Google is working harder everyday to provide search results that are relevant to what the searcher is looking for. Therefore it only makes sense that for your site or blog to rank high on Google you need pages that are relevant. That means the words on each page must relate in some way to the keyword you are optimizing it for.

Websites that were built primarily to spam search engines and make a quick buck with programs like Google Adsense have fallen by the wayside. A quality website is now built for the long term and the new buzzword I see more and more is “authority site.”

An authority website is built around hundreds, and perhaps even thousands, of keywords phrases. Many of these are phrases where the searcher is typing in 4, 5, 6, or more words into the search box. These are called long tail keywords and authority sites are optimizing their web pages and blog posts to target phrases like this.

I have a business that is an article writing business for websites and blogs. We used to pay attention to keyword density when we wrote an article. Now we pay attention to the words we use. Do they make sense in the context of what we are writing about. If someone takes our article and puts it on a web page or blog post will the search engines view the words as relevant to the title of the article. This is a great thing for those of you who have built website and blogs around the idea of helping people and not trying to fool the searh engines in any way.

Search engine marketing is now a piece of a larger puzzle that includes social marketing, article marketing, forum marketing, as well as paid advertising. Although the search engines still provide a high number of visitors to websites that develop themselves into authority sites webmasters are finding they can quickly get traffic to even a brand new site.

This is achieved by providing quality information in a blog and then creating a viral marketing effect through pinging and relevant social networks. You can and still optimize each blog posts for the search engines, but do not rely solely on them to get you traffic.

So to answer the question do you know where your online business is heading the answer is yes now you do. You have to blog and you have to submit articles to article directories and social directories. This is the backbone you need to build your business on for the future.

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