Search Engine Optimization

Allright , lets start with the holy grail of internet marketing , Search Engine Optimization.

Since the emergence of search engines like google and yahoo especially google ( it occupies 45% of all the search results being conducted on the internet ) , there has been a lot of focus on SEO in order to increase the rankings of the website and get it as high as possible on the search engines . There are a lot of theories floating out there about the various possible ways to get top rankings .

Search Engine Optimization can be accomplished using various techniques . They basically fall under two different categories : White Hat and Black Hat techniques.

White Hat Techniques

White hat methods of SEO involve following the search engines' guidelines as to what is and what isn't acceptable. Their advice generally is to create content for the user, not the search engines; to make that content easily accessible to their spiders; and to not try to game the system. Often, webmasters make critical mistakes when designing or setting up their websites, inadvertently "poisoning" them so that they will not rank well. White hat SEOs attempt to discover and correct mistakes, such as machine-unreadable menus, broken links, temporary redirects, or a poor navigation structure.

White Hat Techniques are detailed as under :

*Using unique and relevant title to name each page.

*Editing web pages to replace vague wording with specific terminology relevant to the subject of the page, and that the audiences that the site was developed for will expect to see on the pages, and will search with to find the page.

*Increasing the amount of unique content on the site.

*Writing quality content for the website visitors instead of the search engines.

*Using a reasonably-sized, accurate description meta tag without excessive use of keywords, exclamation marks or off topic terms.

*Ensuring that all pages are accessible via anchor tag hyperlinks, and not only via Java, Javascript or Macromedia Flash applications or meta refresh redirection; this can be done through the use of text-based links in site navigation and also via a page listing all the contents of the site (a site map).

*Allowing search engine spiders to crawl pages without having to accept session IDs or cookies.

*Developing linking strategies. High quality websites that offer interesting content or novel features tend to accumulate large numbers of backlinks.

*Writing useful, informational articles under a Creative Commons or other open source license, in exchange for attribution to the author by hyperlink.

Black Hat Techniques:

"Black hat" SEO as defined by Wikipedia are methods to try to improve rankings which are disapproved of by the search engines, typically because they consider such methods deceptive, and unrelated to providing quality content to site visitors. Search engines often penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from the search engines altogether. Such penalties are usually applied automatically by the search engines' algorithms, because the Internet is too large to make manual policing of websites feasible.

Some of the Black Hat techniques include:

* Spamdexing : Spamdexing is the promotion of irrelevant, chiefly commercial, pages through deceptive techniques and the abuse of the search algorithms. The pages are optimized with a very high keyword density so that the search algorithms give that page more weightage in the search results.

* Cloaking is the practice of serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors.

The consensus on best way to go about doing Search Engine Optmization is to build a website that the search engines can spider easily and offers good , solid , relevant content for the site visitors.