The only necessity you really need to make legitimate money on the Internet, is traffic. It's the life blood of online marketing that no business run from the Internet can do without. The most sought after type of traffic comes directly from the search engines. The visitors it can generate are high quality and more likely to purchase from you. Search engines are treated like kings, being offered the fruits of labor from entrepreneurs online in the form of carefully optimized websites. Everyone hopes the search engines are kind enough to reward their sites with high rankings that can result in more traffic. So, what makes search engines happy?
Through all of our attempts to influence the search engines, we forget why they exist in the first place. The search engine's main function is to display the most relevant search result for every inquiry made through their service. The truth is, it is really in the search engine's greatest interest that nobody manipulates their ranking system by using SEO strategies so that the customers using their service are returned the best relevant search results. Obviously, this doesn't happen the way the search engine companies want them to and they really can't penalize most websites for it. However, they can and will penalize those websites that are using deceptive SEO strategies that are used only to fool the search engines. These strategies are know as Black Hat SEO techniques, and if caught using them, you can get your site removed from the search engine indexes.
Some examples of Black Hat SEO are: Linkfarms(massive linking with other sites in a group where the only goal is to increase link popularity), creating web pages with duplicate content, overuse of keywords, cloaking(purposely giving search engine spiders different pages than visitors see) and hiding text from visitors that only spiders can read. These are some of the unethical methods that people are using to try to fool the search engines. A lot of these techniques can make your rankings fall and some will get you banned. Search engines hate being manipulated to this extreme. if you are discovered using them, you will get penalized.
If you want your website to rank well, it's important to know how search engines work. Algorithms are the formulas that engines use to determine how to rank a web page. These formulas are a well kept secret in the search engine industry. Nobody really understands how their ranking system works, but they do vary with each search company. What we do know is that these algorithms are always changing, especially to fight over abused SEO techniques. SEO strategies that are effective today, may not work well the next day. It's a good idea to stick to the basic fundamentals of SEO that have been time tested.
Search engines are constantly looking for methods to deliver better search results to their users. Instead of concentrating on strategies to fool these companies, it's more important to focus on creating relevant content on your website. You will never get punished if you do this. Place yourself in the search engine's position. They want to give searchers the most relevant search results possible, so give them lots of relevant content on your site. Using bad tricks can get you penalized and cause you to lose a lot of valuable traffic for your online business. Just concentrate on continually growing your website with good, solid content and avoid unethical SEO tricks. This is the best way to the search engine's heart and it will remain that way. Good luck to you and your success!
