SEO - Green Red and Grey Techniques in Website Search Engine Optimization

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the most important but also most difficult task in website design and administration. A successful search engine optimization will make a website or webpage be ranked high with major search engines and subsequently increase the visibility of the site. There are virtually uncountable articles on the net talking about SEO. Many provide helpful tips on search engine optimizations; but some are indeed misleading. Certain inappropriate SEO techniques can adversely impact search engine ranking. In general, there are green, red and also grey areas in the website search engine optimization SEO.

Green Areas of website search engine optimization SEO

Two key green techniques in search engine optimization are writing good page contents and working on effective link popularity. The importance of link popularity has to certain extent been exaggerated in many SEO advices. In fact, the most fundament aspect in search engine optimization is the off page optimization. A well written webpage with clear and focal key words or key 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, 2. 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 experience tells us both tags do have significant contributions to search engine optimization if they are not spam oriented. 

In terms of link popularity SEO, it is necessary to have certain amount of external links to your web pages. However, such links must be effective. The effective 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 monetization if your sites are intended for profit. Particularly, Twitter is a great platform to improve your site popularity.

Red areas of website search engine optimization SEO

Certain techniques must not be used in website search engine optimization. Otherwise, your site may be penalized by search engines. Some SEO experts advertise new paid "tricks" that guarantee to send thousands of visitors to your site in short 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 popup and pop-under, while major search engines tend to impose severe penalties on those practices. Other techniques must be avoided included keyword spam in off page optimization; blind and bulk submissions of articles containing your links to non-relevant forums or message boards; and excessive participations in link exchange programs. Whether we should use link exchanges at all remains disputable. We do have seen positive results in some cases. Nevertheless, massive and excessive use certainly doesn't help.

Grey areas of website search engine optimization SEO

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 or social networking 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 "misuse". Nevertheless, certain "grey" techniques in search engine optimization can be utilized to promote non-blog or non-news type sites through social media network with legitimacy. Here is how.

First, write a nice informational article pertaining to the content of your website. For example, if your site is about your 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 to your site and have it linked to other pages. Make sure the article page is also linked from at least one of the main pages in your site, such as a support page, a knowledge base page or a resource page.

Finally, submit the link pointing to the article (not your site) URL to a popular social networking bookmark site. There are many such sites available. You can easily find them by searching for "social media". If you plan to submit the link to multiple social media sites, it is recommended to input a unique tile and a unique description in each site.