More about SEO, black hat, white hat, no hat

Since I wrote an article warning about not wasting your money on “link farms” to try and get better page ranking, lets write another one about search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. Search Engine Optimization or SEO has become a multi million dollar industry, since most web owners want to make money with their businesses and websites, they realize that the only way to do it is by driving lots of highly targeted visitors to their particular portal, web page, or store front. Lets get busy:

1. Avoid “black hat SEO” techniques. If someone recommends you to hide links by changing the font color to the color of the background, don’t do it. Also, when you write for your blog or web page, make sure that the content of what you are writing makes sense. Some people used to advocate writing all your keywords, several times, in a long nonsensical litany of words. Avoid, making duplicate web pages, with the same content. The problem lies that when the search engine Gods find out, and they will, your website will be penalized and possibly banned form search engines.

2. Tags and Meta tags make sure that you know the difference, and place your keywords on the title tag accordingly.

3. Ensure that you repeat your key words in the body of the article. Please write coherently. It is counterproductive to write your keywords over and over trying to write so the search engines will pick them up. When you write that way, you forget the primary target demographic: humans. I don’t know you, but I get annoyed easily, and if what I am reading does not make sense, will never subscribe to your blog or page.

4. Use Google web master tools (they are free) to search for html coding mistakes.

5. Think your keywords through. Most of the times, people use phrases when they search for merchandise or just doing research. So if you are selling cowboy hats, make sure that you include “cowboy hat”, “white cowboy hat”, “black cowboy hat”, etc. Got the picture?

6. Link building. In three words: “forget link farms”. Get your links the old fashion way, by commenting on blogs, , giving things away, and trading with other webmasters. Yes, I know, it is not easy, and it takes time. But I never did promise you that it was going to be easy, did I?

The bottom line is that search engines search and assign page ranking based on an algorithm, and unless you are a math mayor, or a computer guru, you will not know what it is. And here is the bad news, the people that is selling you the promise of a better page ranking, probably doesn’t know either, since the search engine gods change the algorithm to fool those who try to cheat.

Provide great content, participate in discussions on high traffic blogs, volunteer to write a guest post for a high traffic blog, and “never give up, never give up, never give up”.