The wild and often oddly mythical world of search engine optimization (SEO) is filled with old wives' tales, facts, and a mix of the two. Separating fact from fiction is often far more complicated than you might think possible but with a few cold and hard facts as well as the do's and don'ts of SEO, you will be well on your way to having a site and content that search engines like and that will receive highly targeted web traffic.

1. Keyword density is an important component for SEO. Although not the one nail on which to hang your hat, the more desirable keywords your article contains, the better off you will be and the more visitors search engines will send your way. In other words, if you are writing about the importance of SEO and do not use this term until your final sentence, the odds are good that you have missed the boat. On the other hand, overuse the keywords so as to goad search engines to send you visitors, and you will have web traffic that jumps ship as soon as they read the beginning of your articles and the impossible linking of a bunch of buzz words and key terms. The trick to keyword density is balance.

2. SEO requires competition and niche thinking. If you are writing about the DeBeers lawsuit, you can bet that there will be a plethora of articles and websites dedicated to the same topic. While you may have some strong competition for the most commonly used keywords and phrases, make sure you also bolster your article or site with some rarer ones that the majority of your competition will not think about: the niche words. Thus, address the needs of the commercial diamond users at least in passing while offering information to the private consumer front and center.

3. Without relevant keywords, your SEO attempts are in vain. Who has not received the spam emails that contain gibberish of highly sought after terms? Sure, they might have tricked your spam filter, but they probably also ticked you off and you won't be caught dead buying from those spammers. Turning this around, do not try to trick visitors to come to your site by enlisting much sought after keywords that have nothing to do with the site's actual content.

Of course, no amount of SEO tweaking can replace the unique content to a website that attracts new visitors, and the sticky content that keeps them coming back. Do's and don'ts of SEO may cover the nuts and bolts approaches possible, but even the most relevant and organized by the book website will fail to appeal to a visitor if it does not have that wow factor which will set it apart from all the other websites that have read the same manual. It is in this little wildcard that the true genius of SEO strategies is revealed: the marriage between abiding by rules through the following of algorithms and high level creativity born of an understanding of consumer behavior.