SEO or search engine optimization means altering your website so it appears higher in the search engine rankings. The reason behind this is to increase the number of visitors to your site, which will in turn increase your revenue. The biggest three search engines, Google, Yahoo! and MSN all have recommended guidelines that if you stick to, will ensure they don't ban your website from their results.



SEO is not a dark art - just by meeting the guidelines means that your site stands a good chance if people are looking for its content. There are however, many different ways to optimise your site and some of these can get you banned. They tend to be called 'black hat' practices - good practice is 'white hat' and some techniques which walk close the to black hat line are unsurprisingly called 'grey hat'.

Black hat practices include keyword stuffing - this is where you repeat the same words or phrases over and over on your page to try and get higher rankings, and hidden text - where you write loads of words and phrases in the same colour as your page background so the search engines see them but visitors don't. Keyword stuffing tends to render your pages unreadable to visitors, and a keyword or keyphrase density over about 8% is thought to alert the search engines. Hidden text is also frowned upon because it can get visitors to your pages under false pretences. Result if you're caught? Being banned, or your pages ranking on the 700th page which is effectively the same thing.

Don't be tempted to use free submission services to add your site to 80000 search engines - how many search engines do you know of and how many do you use? The risk of using such a service is that your website gets listed on sites that don't do anything for your reputation as a respectable site. Google uses its Pagerank algorithm to give a 'trust' rating from 0 to 10 for every site in it's index - the higher the pagerank of a site that links to your, the more reputation it passes on to your site. Fewer links from high pagerank sites counts for far more than many links form sites with no pagerank at all.

And whilst on the subject of links, don't try and get all your links at once - if you suddenly gain 1000 links and then no more for a few months the search engines will think that you're not obtaining them naturally through having a great site. Patience really works when building links. And try to get them from sites related to yours - again this increases your reputation in the search engine's eyes, rather than being listed on a page of 100 random links. Oh, and also, try to ensure that you are listed on a page of no more than about 30 outgoing links - this helps too! Finally on the topic of links, don't get all your links to the main page on your site, try to get internal links too as this is a more natural linking pattern which the search engines prefer.

Other practices to avoid include keyword stuffing your meta tags - mentioning one word more than about three times will not help your site. Don't submit your website to the search engines weekly - just once will do the trick, and with proper linking, your site will be found anyway. Don't have multiple websites with exactly the same content - this will alert the duplicate content filters and finally, don't use cloaking methods where the search engines see one page and visitors another.