In the past few years, search engine optimization (SEO) has become increasingly needed and used, even though it has been around for much longer than most people think. With new development tools being used to create websites that are Java, Flash and image intensive, it's important to have something that search engines can read. If search engines can't read your content, they can't index it, and if your site isn't indexed, it won't be found when people search for it on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or anywhere else. . This article will outline what SEO is, how it works, and some unethical SEO methods you should avoid.
What is SEO?
SEO is a way to analyze your site and modify it so that search engines can read and index it more easily. SEO is about maintaining and building websites that rank high in the major search engines.
You see, when people use a search engine, they generally don't look past the top 20 results. If you want to make any money from your site, you need to rank in the top 20 out of potentially hundreds of sites.
How does SEO work?
Search engines maintain a huge database containing information from individual web pages. Most of the information that search engines collect is not listed on their results pages, but is taken into account when deciding how to rank those results.
It is very important that you encourage the search engines to rank your website high and you can do this by using the keywords you use on your website as well as when you submit it. If the keywords you use in your submission tool don't match the keywords on your site, you could hurt your rankings - make sure you have all the keywords you want to use on your site before you submit.
Most sites do not target their topic well, so keyword lists of 50 or more phrases per page are recommended. Targeting certain pages of your website for keywords will give you a higher search engine score.
Free search engines.
The major search engines on the Internet are still free, and it's not difficult to use this free advertising - you can do it in an hour.
There are several companies that provide free SEO tools, or you can pay a professional to do it for you. When you look around the web, there are all sorts of useful resources.
What is Unethical SEO?
Unethical search engine optimization techniques can be illegal, unscrupulous, or just plain bad taste. You'd be surprised how many people use these methods. Much of what is now called unethical SEO used to be accepted until people overdid it and it began to have a negative impact on the web as a whole.
Keyword stuffing is when your pages consist of long lists of keywords and nothing else. Don't do it. There are ways to put keywords and phrases on your site without risking getting banned.
You may have seen "invisible text" if you were selecting text on a page and found words that were the same color as the background. This text is often a list of keywords thrown in there in hopes of fooling search engine spiders while hiding the words from visitors. This is considered unethical and you should not do it.
A landing page is a page that is not designed to be seen by real people - it is purely for search engines and crawlers to try to get them to index the site for a higher position. This is a big no-no and should be avoided.
While unethical SEO is tempting and works, you shouldn't do it – not only is it annoying for users, but it's likely to get you banned from the search engines sooner or later. Ranking your site in search engines is simply not worth the risk. Use effective SEO techniques to rank your site higher and stay away from anything that even looks like unethical SEO.
SEO is a set of techniques used to attract visitors or potential customers to your website and the goal of a search engine is to provide high quality content to internet users. These two goals are not at odds if you do SEO the way it should be done.
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