Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation, the process of optimizing your website to appear higher for the natural search engine listings. Any search engine optimization is carried out with the long term aim of reaching the top of the search engine rankings results and therefore bringing more quality traffic to your website.
The main SEO strategies centre on modifying sites content to both increase its relevance for specific keywords and phrases. Another main strategy revolves around building links to a site as major search engines view sites with more links as being relevant and important and therefore rank it higher. This link building strategy can be carried out in a number of ways, such as submitting your site to directories, forum marketing and article writing.
The techniques listed above are examples of ‘White Hat’ techniques and are considered legal by Search engines and any website will not receive sanctions by the Search engines.
However there are some ‘Black Hat’ SEO techniques that are outlawed by the Search engines and they will ban any sites that are caught carrying out these Black Hat Techniques. These techniques usually involve deceiving the search engines or attempting to manipulate its rankings. This gives the illusion that the site is relevant to certain terms and is deemed of being linked to. Another technique is by adding text to a page that is the same as the background colour as to hide the text from the viewer. Also ‘keyword stuffing’ is another technique that will cause a ban as it is seen as spamming a page as it reduces its utility and can decieve the viewer.
One of the most famous cases of sites misleading its viewers is BMW and Rioch’s of Germany who were banned for a short while for adding mis-leading phrases to a site.