The following guest article comes courtesy of Susanta Sahoo, webmaster for seo-contentwriter.com

It’s pretty interesting to see how search engine optimization has evolved over the last few years. Techniques that serious webmasters deployed five years ago have become virtually obsolete. Remember the good old days when webmasters built their online marketing campaign around little more than directory submission, reciprocal links and meta tag optimization?

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Search engines have always liked regular infusions of fresh content, but about two years ago a renewed Google algorithm woke webmasters to the need to build quality content – not just keyword stuffed quantity – as a part of their organic search engine campaign. Google’s new emphasis on semantics (the attempt to automate the study of meaning) switched the role of good content from an abstract value to a top priority.

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Fresh, high-quality content plays a vital role in the SEO process. Whether you need an article, blog entry or press release, a skilled web content writer is mandatory.  Even in a post Web 2.0 world of user-generated content this is a given. Even when everybody talks, some people are better at starting and directing the conversation. Recently, Chicago’s Ad:Tech conference emphasized social media. It’s now a permanent landmark on the web; MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter let people connect quickly, easily and constantly. But ease means noise; you need quality to counter the raw background volume of modern social media content.

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Blogging is an indispensable tool for social media networking. Ironically, that’s because it has a “Web 1.5” quality that makes it the bedrock of your social media presence due to its stability, strong association with the base site (but with aggregation options – RSS is great, but not everyone reads by feed!) and focus on relatively traditional text content. Nobody needs to be a social media expert to read a blog.  Nevertheless, the format opens the way to powerful, flexible processes. Speed blogging and collaborative blogs are examples of the ways that innovative input makes the most out of a focused output format.

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Blogging is the bridge between social media and the traditional web. Its importance shows that organic search engine optimization approach hasn’t lost its importance, however. We often get so dazzled by social media that we forget that the point is to drive traffic to our sites. Social media is the invitation; site-based SEO is the map to get there.

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