SEO Techniques to Know and Avoid

Having a website is truly great for business, especially in these tech-savvy times, but merely having one and then doing nothing to promote it or optimize it for people to find and know about it makes all your efforts futile. Attracting potential clients to your site and eventually your business means that you need to optimize your content in order to appeal to the people you want to appeal to. This entails search engine optimization; that is, optimizing your site so that people can find your site through search engines.

Keywords play a big part in this .In SEO (search engine optimization), there are two techniques currently in use. These are black hat and white hat techniques. For the good of your site, these techniques are best avoided because they could eventually lead to your site being banned from search engines.

It also does not offer anything to add to your site's value. Some black hat techniques are:

Spamming - Spamming may occur in the form of comments in blogs that have links to make the reader click on them to drive traffic to the site, or in the form of blogs that companies make whose entries merely contain keywords (simply put, the content is not quality content), and it is these blogs that are the source of the comment spam one sees.

The idea is to have people click on the links to drive traffic to the site, thus making them rank higher on search engine listings.

Cloaking - This is when the content presented to the search engine is different from what a visitor to the site may see. This method fools search engines into displaying that site when it would not be displayed otherwise.

Doorway and Gateway sites - These are sites set up that contain practically nothing except for some keywords that trick the search engine spider into indexing it higher up on search results. They usually have a redirection tool that leads to a "real" (although most times is just contains spam content) website. They have no use to the web surfer at all.

Keyword stuffing - This is when a site is filled with as many keywords and meta tags as possible in an attempt to fool the search engines into redirecting people into the site. Meanwhile, white hat techniques are the good guys so to speak.

These are more legit and more effective in driving traffic to your site. Keywords are very important in SEO, but it is how these keywords are used that make the difference. Writing quality content that contains the necessary keywords is a great way to not only have the search engines find you, but it is one way of attracting traffic as well. Quality cannot be stressed enough. Perhaps more important than content is the web site title and the content title. These are the first things that the spiders see when they crawl over your site. You want to have the necessary keywords there as well. Have a go at social networking.

These days, it is an important part of keeping a web site running. Your social network profile could serve as a supplement to your web site. And in the spirit of social networking, having some apps or some user-friendly tools that your visitors can download is another great way to attract future customers. When it comes to SEO, the hat you wear does matter. Here's to hoping that white hat is the one you choose, and your business couldn't be happier.