Gone are the days when good ranking among the spider based search engines like Google or Altavista meant simple adjustments to metatags (the place on an HTML page where the keywords are listed).

Now in their 3rd generation, these search engines de-emphasize metatags in favor of analyzing visible content to establish website theme and off-page factors like links from other websites to support that theme.

A website theme is what a search engine thinks your website is all about (regardless of what keywords are placedc in the metatags). They use complex algorithms to analyze the visible content of each website page to determine where and how often words and phrases occur.

When common words (a, the, it, etc.) are removed, search engines can determine which phrases are most common and where they occur to establish a website's theme, focus and strength. Stronger themes mean higher ranking.

When keywords are strategically placed in the visible and invisible content, a website's theme can be crafted. For this reason the choice of keywords is an essential starting point for all website promotion campaigns that rely on search engine results.