Anyone who has tried to get a site to rank highly in the search engines knows that it takes a lot more than "great content" to get the job done. There are millions of sites competing for each keyword or keyphrase that's worth going after, and thousands of them have content worth reading. Clearly, many other factors have to be in place for any site to make it all the way to the top. What are some of these factors?
Links are king. Content has tried to lay claim to the throne for over a decade, but Google's algorithm depends on links. A site that doesn't have any other sites linking to it will not be seen regardless of anything else.
For this reason, any comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) strategy will include a campaign to get more links. The catch is that some link-building efforts can actually get a site penalized or banned instead of causing it to rank higher. Some of these bad methods are obvious. For example, it doesn't take much to realize that spamming out tens of thousands of links on unrelated blogs is going to raise red flags at the Googleplex. Other, more subtle, methods are better.
Some SEO companies swear that keyword density no longer matters, while others will meticulously aim to put a specific percentage of keywords in every 100 words of other content. Which is correct? It's likely that neither extreme are on the money. Instead, content should have a "natural" amount of keyword mentions. Unfortunately, the search engine isn't telling which percentage it considers to be natural on any given day. However, thanks to the very way automated algorithms work, there has to be a specific density or range of densities that open this lock. Automatic sorting programs may not be Sith, but they most definitely deal in absolutes.
There once was a time when the idea of content being important was flatly dismissed by those at the top of the engine, but those golden days ended quite a while ago. Now, Google has finally devised algorithms that can tell the good from the garbage. This means that sites have to have content that is humanly-readable, relevant, and generally of decent quality. Those that do not will soon suffer ranking penalties.
These are just some of the factors that go into SEO Denver and other places. To learn about the many other aspects of the art, contact an SEO expert.
