The New Year is fast approaching and it is this time of the year when most people make resolutions to make changes in their lives. That makes it a perfect time to think about your website and the changes it may need to compete with all the other businesses in this fast paced world.

If over the last year you have begun to see a decrease in views to your website and a drop in business, quite possibly this is because your website has not kept with the changing trends in search engines that began with Google Panda and now includes a growing reliance in social media chatter to decide what web pages should rank high and which ones lack exceeding low.

It used to be that website optimization was as simple as finding out what keywords were trending and using those keywords in your web pages. For outside links you simply needed to write an article to post somewhere else that linked back to the website and would bring in thousands of new visitors. Those things have now changed making it much more difficult to gain those Google rankings than ever before.

Website Optimization No Longer Is Dependent On Keywords

While using some keywords to get your web pages noticed by Google search engine is still important it is less important than it once was. Adding new and useful content that people find actually helpful is now a must with keyword density dropping to ½ or 1/3 of what it once was. In addition, it is more difficult to create back links as well because the search engines demand new and original content. The content farms have all gone or changed in order to meet Google's changing demands.

In addition, with more people using Social media like Twitter and Facebook for business these days, search engines rely on these sites for back links to website looking for not only the frequency that your website is mentioned but also at who is mentioning your website.

What this all means is that your website needs to be updated to make the most of SEO and get you a better ranking in 2012. One way of ensuring that your website is optimized to rank better in 2012 is to hire a website consulting firm that has followed and understands the changes made to the search engine ranking and can help you to institute the changes your website needs to climb up those search engine ranks where it belongs.

If your business depends on your website to bring in customers and your site needs to be seen in order to perform that very important function it's time to do some changes. The higher your web pages climb in search engine ranking the more notice your website will get, and the more business you will generate. So, now is the time to find that great SEO consulting firm that will be able to make the website optimization changes you need to get you better search engine ranking in 2012.