There are three basic forms of search engine optimization. The Good, the Bad and "Tecnically Correct while remaining precariously perched on a tight rope between the good and the bad", the Grey Hats 

White Hat Methods (The Good) - The first are the "GOOD" Search Engine Friendly techniques also known as White Hat methods. Search engines require that websites follow certain rules in order to be indexed. Getting your website into a search engines results pages or SERP's isn't guaranteed by any means. However, following the search engines terms of service (ToS) is the easiest way to make sure your website has the best chance of being included. 

Black Hat Methods (The Bad) - These are the evil sons who have no regard for staying within the boundries of service terms.  If they can influence, fool or flat out steal from a company, they will.  I'm probably offending some right now, making myself a target. The tools in this guys bag of tricks generally are ways of tricking search engines into seeing a website differently than it truly is. Some of these tricks may include dropping cookies, doorway pages,  hidden text,  keyword spamming,  text stuffing,  spamming forums using URL cloaking tricks,  redirects, and mirroring competitors sites to confuse the search engines. Using these methods can often have a positive short term effect, but in the long run they will eventually be banned. (Before purchasing a dropped domain name make sure it wasn't used for that purpose, or it may take months to get re-included).

Grey Hat Methods (The Ugly but still ok to use) - There are those slightly shady techniques that for all intents and puposes are still legal to use, they'd certainly lift an eyebrow or two from many professional marketers. These techniques are sometimes referred to as the Grey Hat methods. The Gray Hats tend to discover holes in processes that can be exploited through online, service based, network based, or in software programming.


Focus More On Content

Logic tells us that unique content holds the highest value in our optimization toolbox. Content is king because it's everything to a good marketing plan. Without good content a site is destined to collect dust unless something supernatural manages to take place. I prefer to not expect something supernatural happening in most cases. You can pray to the Internet spirits and cross your fingers, or you can plan your website(s) to inherit good organic rankings by building it with good meaningful content that people will actually look for.

Let's take a moment to talk about Instant or Turnkey Websites.

Unless you are a domainer (URL investor) and use certain turnkey scripts to park your inventory, DON'T USE GENERIC SCRIPTS thinking you'll earn a living at it. Do your homework, choose a good URL, create quality Titles and Descriptions for every page, offer unique Products and Services, and above all, build good content rich pages on your website. You may have also heard of terms like "Branding" and "Brand Awareness".  These should only be considered once you're absolutely sure you have the ability to create a content rich site that will act as a vehicle to be "branded".

Okay, you have a website loaded with unique content... Now What?

This is really where the balancing act of proper optimization begins. You now have to create a relationship between what your customers will read and what the search engines will read. No, we aren't talking about two different pages, but you'll have to create your content to please two different entities. What the search engines like isn't always what your customers will be able to read and vise versa.  Now that you've created content you'll have to edit and adjust it to be balanced not only for the reader, but also for the search engines. Let's go through the different parts of the page to see what we can do to optimize it for both humans and machines.

Do you have your keywords and phrases targeted properly?
Have you concentrated on several niche phrases that will represent the most important on your page? This builds the perception of authority which will raise your SERP for the phrases that you target.

Titles: If you only do one thing to optimize a page with a keyword phrase it should done in the title tag. Doing it right will help you to start getting your pages climbing the ladder, doing it wrong can destroy your efforts.

Descriptions: While the description tag is generally thought to carry little authoritative benefit it does carry real world benefits. A poorly written description or leaving it to be created from the page content isn't always the solution. Think about what a person, who is searching for your services or products, will want to read after finding your search listing. The description should always be written as an enhancement to the title and vice versa. The combination of the title and description are the same as your yellow pages ad would be in the phone book.  Would you call a plumber to fix your leaky faucet if his title was "Plumber" and description was "When I first started plumbing I was...etc"?  Think about how your titles and descriptions can be crafted to be search strong while at the same time grabbing a readers attention and sparking their curiosity. 

On Page Strength: Content Strength of a page has become an issue of great debate. The keyword content strength is calculated as a percentage of instances to other words on the page. If you have 100 words on a page and 3 instances of your keyword then that would be 3% content strength. You should only target 2-3 primary keyword phrases on each page that you publish. You should place an emphasis on your keywords by including them inside heading tags within pages. Keyword stuffing is the practice of over using keywords on a page in an atempt to fool the search engines into believing a page is more authoritative than it may actually be. It doesn't work and it can get you sandboxed, so don't do it!  While I don't approve of keyword stuffing I do prefer to have a bit of weight to my pages and I usually shoot for the 2-3% range for my main phrase and a little less for the secondary phrases.

Keyword Metas: Not much weight there, but to be safe always use 6-10 primary phrases in decending order of importance. It never hurts to cover all of your bases. 

How do I know what my keyword targets are?

Let's say that you sell sprockets for the Spacely Sprocket Company. Choosing the content on your page is as simple as presenting all the different styles of sprockets that you offer along with detailed information on each sprocket.  Do a search through the internet for "sprockets" and then review the top 10 results.  Investigate your competitions websites to see if you can detect why the guys on top, are on top. Look at the source code of those pages to see how they've used Titles and Descriptions, Heading Tags, Alternate text on images, and so on. Your competition is your best friend when it comes to optimization.  This form of research is known as "Discovery" in the world of SEO.

The bottom line is to get your content to be informative to the reader and contain a set of keyword and keyword phrases that you have targeted to be authoritative in the eyes of the search engines. Once you have this figured out you can move to titles, descriptions, alternate text, paths, file naming and other "On Page" optimization techniques.

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