The next realization that comes is that simply being listed is not enough. To get traffic from search engines, you must come up at or near top of results for those searches that relate to your site.

Some call it search engine optimization, others search engine placement, and others search engine promotion. Regardless of name, it is all really same thing. It is art of getting traffic from engines.

Search engine optimization is a big business, and understandably so, but question is, "Is it worth paying a firm to promote your site or is it truly something you can do yourself?"

Unfortunately, there is no cut-and-dry answer to this question as it is going to differ from person to person. In some cases, it can be well worth money to hire an outside firm for your optimization needs, in other cases, you may be better off doing it yourself.

First let me answer a few questions and dispel a few myths that some of less reputable firms like to promote.

Q - Can I do optimization myself? A - Yes, and in many cases be extremely successful.

Q - Is search engine optimization hard? A - Yes and no. As with any new skill, there is a learning curve involved, but unless you are in an extremely competitive area, just having an understanding of how search engines work and rank pages, can be enough for you to design some good ranking pages.

Q - Do I need to have any expensive software or programming skills? A - No. Anything and everything can be done by hand. All you need to be able to do optimization yourself is a basic understanding of HTML.

Q - Don't I just need to put my keywords in Title and Meta tags? A - Unfortunately, while this was true a couple of years ago, it is a bit more complicated than this now. Meta tags, play an extremely small role in optimization in todays search engines.

Now that we have a few of most common questions out of way, let's take a deeper look at which option may be right for you.

First let's start with hiring an optimization firm and look at pro's and con's involved.

Pro's

- Optimization firms will already be trained in getting your site to top of engines. - The will know what is required and you will often see results fairly quickly and results will often be better than if you were doing optimization yourself. - You will have free time to devote to other aspects of your business. Con's

However, this basically linear approach is gradually changing now: as mathematical linguistics and automatic content recognition technology progresses, major search engines are shifting their focus towards "theme" biased algorithms that do not rely on analysis of individual web pages anymore but, rather, will evaluate whole web sites to determine their topical focus or "theme" and its relevance in relation to users' search requests.

This is not to say that keyword density is losing in importance, quite contrary. However, it is turning into a lot more complex technology than a simple computation of word frequency per web page can handle.

Context analysis is now being determined by a number of auxiliary linguistic disciplines and technology, for example: * semantic text analysis * textlexical database technology * distribution analysis of lexical components (such as nouns, adjectives, verbs) * evaluation of distance between semantic elements * AI and data mining technology based pattern recognition; * term vector database technology etc.

All these are now contributing to increasing sophistication of relevance determination process. If you feel this is beginning to sound too much like rocket science for comfort, you may not be very far from truth: it seems that future of search engine optimization will be determined by what industry is fond to term "word gurus".

A sound knowledge of fundamental linguist methodology plus more than a mere smattering of statistical calculus will most probably be paramount to achieve successful search engine rankings in foreseeable future. Merely repeating well worn mantra "content is king!", as some of lesser qualified SEO professionals and very many amateurs are currently doing, may admittedly have a welcome sedative effect by creating a feeling of fuzzy warmth and comfort. But to all practical purposes it is tantamount to whistling in dark and fails miserably in doing justice to overall complexity of process involved.

It should be noted that we are talking presence AND future here: many of classical techniques of search engine optimization are still working more or less successfully, but there is little doubt that they are rapidly losing their cutting edge and will probably be as obsolete in a few months' time as spamdexing or invisible text - both optimization techniques well worth their while throughout 90s - have become today.

So where does keyword density come into this equation? And how is it determined anyway?

There's rub: term "keyword density" is by no means as objective and clear-cut as many people (some SEO experts included) will have it! The reason for this is inherent structure of hypertext markup language (HTM) code: as text content elements are embedded in clear text command tags governing display and layout, it is not easy to determine what should or should not be factored into any keyword density calculus.