Types of SEO

SEO comes in three flavors.Some better than others:

1. Search Engine Optimization
Ensuring that your code and content is appropriately organized and easy for search engines to interpret accurately.
2. Search Engine Exaggeration
Reinforcing your desired keywords through frequent repetition, hidden keywords, etc
3. Search Engine Deception
Creating content, pages, etc., that aren’t intended for human consumption, but are instead designed only to pull in search engine traffic.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO means that you’ve accurately portrayed your website’s content through clean code*, wellwritten content*, and wellorganized web sites*.

All of these practices will not only help your readers better understand your site, they’ll also help search engines index and interpret your site well, which in turn leads to better rankings.

Focus on: Relevance

User-centered (as opposed to engine-centered) SEO will never go out of style. Google has an army of scientists analyzing ways to determine the quality of web site content, and the most effective long-term method for looking relevant to their algorithms is simply to be relevant.

Search Engine Exaggeration

This is where things start to get a bit shady. Onceyou realize how search engines work, there’s a great temptation to give them what they want by pumping up the keywords in your text, adding hidden keywords on your pages, etc.

The problem with this approach is that search engines know people do this, and they’re continually working on ways to identify and eliminate it. Remember “meta tags”? Site owners used to pump these full of keywords in order to get more search traffic, until the search engines caught on and dramatically reduced their importance in the ranking process.

If you build your site around the idea that you can throw on some cologne instead of taking a shower, you can only get so far before every realizes you’re just posing. How often have you searched for something, and then clicked through on the top results only to find a junk page crammed with keywords but little useful content? Did you stick around? Did you buy anything?

It’s an issue of quality vs. quantity. You might be able to increase your hits, but you’ll receive a lower percentage of conversions because your pages don’t match the
expectations held by users clicking through from search engines.

Search Engine Deception

It’s easy to be lured into the trap of flat-out lying to search engines. This is the realm of link farms, content generators, gateway pages, blog comment spam, and
other practices that ignore users’ needs (i.e., relevant, well-organized content) and instead focus on doing whatever it takes to get people in the door.

The most significant problem with these techniques is that search engines are becoming increasingly adept in their attempts to detect them, and violating the terms set out by the engines can (and often does) result in sites being severely penalized in their rankings, or in the worst cases, becoming blacklisted (a search engine’s way of removing your site from search results entirely).

Because search engines are constantly updating their ranking criteria, what works today may bite you in the butt tomorrow. Be very wary of practices that exploit currentsearch engine weakness, particularly if your business depends on your website, because you never know when they’re going to find out and come after you.