It used to be that once a webmaster has built a site and loaded it with relevant keywords and other on site optimization techniques they could simply upload the site and expect to start receiving traffic from the major search engines. However, webmasters are eternally in the search for the Holy Grail of Website traffic and they worked hard to tweak their sites keywords and optimize the sites better then other sites on the search engines. This way website would appear first in the search engine rankings. The more webmasters tweaked the more this technique became useless.

The major search engines have to make their money from advertising. Therefore the more people visit their site the more they make money. Offering the search engine feature is not what they are making money from it is from the traffic of people coming to their search engine and clicking on their paid for ads. So the thinking goes the more relevant your search results the more people will come back to your site and the more traffic you will have. So providing the most relevant and useful results to their users is the way search engines make money.

So with the old method that search engines used to rank pages well based on keywords and on site optimization techniques quickly became a problem. You see any webmaster could easily add the perfect amount of keyword to rank well even if they had completely useless information. So this useless website would rank well in the search engine listing just because it had the optimal number of keywords and on site techniques yet it had useless information. It quickly became apparent that it was time to change the game and the major search engines started to use links to rate websites.

Well, of course yet again the smart and cunning webmasters found ways to get their website to easily rank in the top slots even if they did not have relevant information. They would build FFA link pages. FFA is an abbreviation of Free For All and these were web pages where webmaster could easily submit links to their website. Which doesnt sound like a big deal if you think on a small scale but if you submit to 1,000 Free For All link sites then you could easily start ranking really well in the search engines.

The Cat and Mouse game started all over again and the major search engines had to change the formula they use to rate websites. They started to rate websites based on quality links. These are links from other authority sites or other sites with high link popularity that are related to the original website. Therefore having a bunch of links coming to your site from a FFA page soon became a way to have your site delisted or ranked really low. With the new formula websites had to seek quality one way and two way links coming to their site.

The major search engines will continue refining and changing the formula they use to rank websites and the savvy webmaster will continue to learn ways to continually push their website to the top of the crowd. This is a true game of cat and mouse that will continue on for a long time to come. The only thing a webmaster can do is play the game and learn to play it well if they want to receive any traffic to their website. A lot of people just give up and dont even try which helps others who are willing to put in the work. In the end there is no automatic way to rank well without doing some work. However, if the webmaster takes time and does some work on their website and in getting links from others they can quickly rise above the rest and rank well for even competitive keywords. It is just a matter of time and work