I have tried to explain the concept of Search Engine Optimization to my parents in many ways and each subsequent explanation seemed to leave them more confused than the one that preceded it. My mother eventually grasped the notion when I likened the Internet to my dad's chaotic desk and search engines to her elaborate filing system for the scores of different documents that littered its surface. Eureka! Ever since then my notion of Google and its contemporaries has been that of an particularly finely tuned filing system crafted to make the plethora of information the Net holds accessible to us mere mortals.



In keeping with this metaphor], it stands to reason that if you (as a webmaster) want users to find and explore your website you have to get it ?filed? correctly and if you are in a competitive industry ? MOST correctly. If you are selling red cars it would be most important to be ?filed? under cars, since you are selling the automobile, not the colour ? catch my drift?

As consumers we know that we hardly ever even glance at our search results past the second page. This means that if you want a consumer to make use of your page it has to rank within the first twenty websites listed (preferably the first ten) and with the Internet becoming an increasingly saturated advertising medium this can be much easier said than done. This is where Search Engine Optimization comes in. Optimizing a page means it gets more visible and hence more accessible.

But, with great power comes great responsibility. Many a search engine optimizer has slipped over to the bad side, peddling suspect online marketing strategies to a na�ve public. Due to the involved nature of search engine algorithms and society's rudimentary understanding thereof, it is frighteningly easy to fall prey to these vultures. The following are a few ?sure-fire? strategies to look out for.

Submission to "Thousands" of Search Engines: How many search engines do you know of, yet alone use? Google, Yahoo, MSN ? right? There are fewer a hundred search engines worldwide and only ten of these are worth submitting to. Flinging your site onto countless random search engines will only get you into ?link farms?, irrelevant junk pages that get filtered out by proper search engines and your effort could get your site blacklisted in the long run.

Repetitious submission to a single Search Engine: You can't FORCE a search engine to index your site. Chances are if it didn't get indexed the first time there is something wrong with it. Get it fixed and resubmit. It's like getting your essay topic wrong, getting a bad mark and then sending the same essay back to the teacher. Your marks won't improve and you'll just end up irritating the very person you are trying to win over.

Keyword stuffing, ?cloaking? (the use of text that is hidden, either as text coloured similar to the background, in an invisible division, or positioned off screen), doorway pages and multiple domains with identical content are also not cool. These strategies are all referred to as ?Black Hat SEO? and involve attempts to improve a site's rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. We don't like them and neither should you ? they don't work anyway.

?White Hat SEO?, on the flipside, creates content for consumers, not search engines, and then makes that content accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. We like these strategies. They add value to a product AND they work. No smoke and mirrors here.

All you need do is keep in mind that as with everything in life there are rules and if you break them you are bound to be found out sooner or later. That said; play nice and the chances are that proper SEO techniques will do wonders for your business as an online marketing strategy tool.