seo search engine optimizationsSEO, or search engine optimization, is the most critical yet difficult task in website design and internet market. A successful search engine optimization can make a website or webpage be ranked high with major search engines and subsequently increase the visibility of the site. There are huge amount of articles talking about SEO. Many provide helpful tips on search engine optimizations, but some are misleading.  Any inappropriate SEO techniques could backfire and adversely affect search engine ranking. Just like everything in the world, there are green, red but also yellow (or grey) areas in the website search engine optimization SEO and internet marketing.

Green Areas in  SEO and Internet Marketing

Two key green techniques in search engine optimization are writing good page contents and working on effective link popularity. However, the importance of link popularity has to certain extent been exaggerated in many SEO advices. In fact, the most fundamental aspect in search engine optimization is the off page optimization. A well written webpage with clear and focal key words or phrases that are associated with the page topic will be ranked high by major search engines even it has very few external links.  

Key elements in off page optimization include 1. proper keyword density, 2. proper use of ALT and title tag, 3. proper use of h1 and h2 tags, 4. properly written page title, description and keyword list. Many have argued that “description” and  “keyword” no longer have much weight on search engine optimization. I have to disagree. Our experiences tell us both tags do weigh in search engine ranking as long as they are not spam oriented. 

It is still necessary to have certain amount of external links to your web pages. However, such links must be valid ones. The valid links for SEO purposes should occur on the websites that are relevant to your pages and have high page ranks in major search engines. Such websites include popular directories and forums in your field, reputable press release sites that are designed to promote products and services, and generic bookmark sites than don’t disallow sites intended for profit. For example, Digg and Reddit are a great platforms to build popularity.

Red areas in SEO and Internet Marketing

Certain techniques must not be used in website search engine optimization. Otherwise, your site can be severely penalized by search engines. Some SEO experts advertise new paid “tricks” that guarantee to send thousands of visitors to your site in short time to increase site popularity. Don’t be tricked by this type of advertisement. These tricks typically use robots to randomly send spam types of links suck as pop-up and pop-under, while major search engines tend to dislike those malpractices. Other techniques ought to be avoided include keyword spam in off page optimization; blind and bulk submissions of articles containing your links to non-relevant forums or message boards; excessive participation in link exchange programs. Whether we should use link exchanges at all remains disputable. We do see positive results in some cases. Nevertheless, massive and excessive uses certainly don’t help.

Yellow (or grey) areas in SEO and Internet Marketing

Certain SEO techniques can get your web pages promoted fast and ranked high. Submitting a link to a hot social bookmark site may get the linked page indexed and listed in the first few pages by major search engines within hours.  However, these search engine optimization techniques must be used with caution. Publications in social media networks are great means to promote news, information, articles or blogs, but you may have a problem if trying to promote a commercial website. Your sites could be banned permanently for any type of abusing their terms of use. Nevertheless, certain “grey” internet marketing techniques can still be utilized with legitimacy to promote non-blog or non-news type sites through social media network . Here is how.

First, write a nice informational article pertaining to the content of your website. For example, if your site is about a construction business, the article can be about energy saving tips. Article content must be original. A duplication to an existing webpage that has already been published on internet could potentially result in the entire website being banned by the social media sites.

Second, publish the article in your site and have the article page linked to main pages of the site. The article page must also be linked from at least one of the main pages in your site,  which can be a support page, a knowledge base page or a resource page.

Finally, submit links pointing to the article URL (not your index page) to popular social networking bookmark sites. There are many such sites available now with different categorizations. You can easily find them by searching for “social media media network”. When submitting the link to multiple social media sites, it is recommended to put unique tile and description tags in each site.