SEO  -  More than Smoke and Mirrors

The internet and website designs have come along way from  the text based format that it was when it first began.  Obviously, the advancement of technology has had a lot to do with it.  And as with most things that hit the mainstream,  advertising and the ability to make money was leading the way.  Anyone who lived through the dot com era of the internet when people made and loss millions can attest to that.

And along with millions of people uploading websites it soon became harder and harder for people to get noticed or found on the internet.  Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, et al originally wrote algorithms that based search results on meta keywords but it soon became apparent that people were just loading the tags with words that had no correlation to their sites only to get a higher rating on the result pages.

For instance, if your site was promoting a product like rugs and you lived in Vancouver, people would enter words like Canada, BC Ferries, Things to see in Vancouver, coffee shops in Vancouver, or a name of another province