So what do I mean by Forget the HYPE just do it RIGHT.

There are a lot of so called Gurus out there trying to HYPE or SCARE people into buying their latest SEO [Search Engine Optimization] product. They would have you believe that the search engines are some sort of demon that you have to beat, cheat or out-smart into submission. I want to warn you right here to do your own due diligence very thoroughly before purchasing any of these SEO products. This warning is not given to save your money - it's given to save your reputation with the search engines.

Any so called clever tactics to fool the search engines are called "Black Hat" tactics. Get caught using Black Hat tactics and you will get "Black Banned" by the search engines. I will cover in more detail what not to do, later. Just remember that ignorance is no excuse where search engines are concerned, get involved in bad neighborhoods in cyberspace and the search engines will dub you as a bad neighborhood. Search engines work hard not to refer visitors to bad neighborhoods.

 

Tragically some of the Black Hat tactics work extremely well for short periods of time. I say tragically because they are used by people who are not interested in establishing a long term business online. Rather they're trying to make a quick kill, scamming as many people as they can before the search engines ban them. Each time the search engines find a Black Hat Loophole, they have to change their rules. This disrupts every one’s productivity. This problem may become clearer in the following example.   Keeping in mind that the search engines purpose is to respond quickly, with the most relevant results to a query input to it's search bar. This information is gathered by a program commonly called a "Bot" [short for robot] or "Spider" [description of something that crawls the web] or web crawler.   Simply put the bot looks at the search term that someone has input to the search bar on their search engines browser. Let's say the search term was "dog breeders". The word "dog" and the word "breeders" are called "Key Words". Now the "Bot" looks at every web page that is indexed with it's search engine and finds the pages that have the highest density of the Key Words "Dog + Breeders". It also looks at how many relevant sites link to that page - establishes a score for that page and displays it in order of the highest score on it's results page. Phew that's a busy little Bot!   But this bot is a program sifting through all this data at lightening speed no human has assessed the page. Imagine how many years it would take to come up with a result if someone had to physically read the millions of pages to come up with the most pertinent result for your search term. And therein lays a problem - the Bot can be fooled.

Fooling the Bot.

For instance a Black Hat technic used to fool the Bot into believing that a page had a high distribution of the search term "Dog Breeders" was to format the background of a page to have a text colour identical to the background colour and fill the page with the term "Dog Breeders". This made the text invisible to the visitor but not to the Bot. They would then insert a table again with the same background colour but a different text colour. This text was visible to the visitor and delivered whatever message the Black Hat trickster had to offer. How would you feel if you searched for "Dog Breeders" and got presented with a page advertising "Viagra". Or at best a very poor page about "Dog Breeders" which fell well short of the information you were seeking.

 

Of course people started to complain and the search engines had to re-program their Bots. In a further attempt to get quality results for their search clients, the search engine companies decided to rank the websites with a popularity vote from other websites. Webmasters were encouraged to link to other websites that had relevant information to their own sites. Each incoming link to a website from another website counted as a vote of confidence and increased the ranking of that site.

 

Overnight link farms sprang up all over the web - reciprocal linking - article directory submissions, etc. etc. Some Black Hat - some White Hat.[legitimate methods]. I am not going to go into detail here on all the actions and counter actions between Black Hat technics and the search engines. Suffice it to say, that the search engines are very competitive. Their revenue is dependant on advertising. The more search customers they have the more advertisers will advertise with them. Therefore it is in their interest to provide the best search results possible. If you can provide unique relevant content on your website you will be popular with the search engines. After all that is what they are trying to provide to the searcher - their customer.

 

Doing it Right

If you've come here to find Black Hat techniques to increase your traffic you are wasting your time. The techniques outlined above have thankfully been successfully negated by the search engines long ago. Consider doing things the right way, it may take a little longer to establish your sites presence and good reputation but you'll be respected for it in the long run.

SEO [Search Engine Optimization] for Your Site Traffic is two fold.

1. On page Optimization
2. Off page Optimization.