SEO (search engine optimization) has a long and checkered history on the Internet. Proper SEO techniques are changing all the time. What worked last month may cause your website or blog to be completely dropped this month; what you did two years ago almost certainly is ignored by search engines today.

That's why top SEO consulting firms are worth every dime. They keep up with the latest trends. They read all the right blogs, attend the seminars and conferences, and constantly hone their skills. Basically, they keep up with the latest developments, because you just don't have the time.

If you want to understand how far SEO has come, and why the professionals are worth it, it helps to know a brief history of the art and science of it all.

When the Internet first came into regular consumer use, America Online was the big player. There were so few good websites that you could tell your friends about a funny picture or weird dancing baby, and pretty soon, everyone had heard about it.

Nowadays, the Internet is so big, even the search engines are having trouble keeping up. That's why SEO is so important.

Back in the "old days" of SEO, search engines just looked for keywords, and how many times you could use it. If you sold cameras, you might put the keyword "cameras" on your website 30 or 40 times. You didn't have to be that creative, just copy and paste the word so you had several lines of "cameras cameras cameras" along the bottom of your web page.

But that looked nasty, and search engines hated it, so the workaround was to use really small text or make text color match the background color. Of course, this would give you really long pages with a whole lot of nothing at the bottom, and that looked nasty too.

As the search engines wised up to this keyword stuffing, SEO got a lot more difficult. So they started looking at Meta Tags to learn what a page was about. These are the tags that tell search engines what a site is about: Title, Keywords, Description, etc. So SEO professionals started stuffing the meta tags with keywords.

But the search engines didn't just want "cameras cameras cameras" in the meta tags, so the SEO professionals had to get creative. Now the meta tags said "Nikon cameras, Minolta cameras, lenses for cameras, film for cameras," and so on. Frankly, it got a little silly, so some of the search engines would only look at the first few keywords in the meta tag, and if you listed the keyword too many times, you got dropped.

This is about the time that search engines started to diverge in what they indexed, so SEO pros had to make decisions. Yahoo stopped using certain meta tags, while Overture still relied on them. Meanwhile, this upstart called Google was ignoring them completely. The SEO pros had to decide which wagon they were hitching their horses to, and start optimizing more for their chosen search engine than any of the others.

Now, just 10 short years later, Google is the master of all the search engines, several of the old ones are just punchlines to geek jokes, and Yahoo and Bing are fighting to become number two in a three engine market.

Today, the top SEO consulting firms are focusing nearly all of their energy on Google, but are keeping a careful eye on Bing. Their SEO efforts are geared primarily toward what Google wants, but they're not going to get caught short like they did in the early 2000s, when there was some major upheaval in the search engine market.

Now the SEO firms understand what the search engines (i.e. Google) want, and they're still on target to be able to deliver it. They understand the ins and outs of search engine optimization, and are more nimble than they were just a decade ago. Making some basic changes to a website is no longer a three day, labor intensive process, but rather something that can be handled in a matter of hours.

So if you want to place at the top of the search engine results, you owe it to yourself and your bottom line to talk to an SEO professional. Sure, you could do it yourself, but you'll spend hours learning what's acceptable today, and before you realize it, and your competition will make the changes before you even have a chance to react. Do yourself a favor. This is one place where you want to leave it to the pros.