Truthfully, applying all sorts of tricks and techniques to the content and tags for a website won’t make a lasting difference in your rankings and could get you black-listed by Google, Bing, or Yahoo. What I’m talking about is Black Hat strategies for increasing the search engine rankings of your site. Yes, there are many techniques that some webmasters have used in order to trick the search engines into ranking their respective websites very high in the search engine results pages (SERPS). Google and the others know this is going on and they are all taking steps to prevent it. In fact, the search engines make daily changes to their algorithms to combat this. My point is this: Never try to trick the search engines. Besides, is it fair the sites that rank high by using Black Hat techniques should get the bulk of the traffic? If you’ve read any of my articles, I always stress quality content. As it was in the beginning, and as it relates to SEO and your website, content is king. I don’t see that ever changing.

In order to get quality traffic to your site, you must always adhere to the rules. The content of your site is going get you the traffic you seek, and deserve. It won’t happen over night, nor should it. A “quick hit” is not what you want. Instead, having genuinely interested readers of your site is what you should want. These are the people who are going to buy from you today, tomorrow, and next year. Isn’t that why you’re in business to begin with?

To make your site appealing to the search engines, there are, as I said, the Black Hat ways and, you guessed it, the White Hat ways! Guess which one I subscribe to? To get your site optimized, I suggest using a few techniques that will dramatically help the visibility (by the search engines) over time and once you’re done, you’re done. No more having to go back to your page code and start tweaking.

What I’m talking about is making sure your title tags, meta keywords tag, and your description tags are properly set up and worded correctly. You can usually access these by going to the admin side of your site, or you can edit your code directly inside of an HTML code editor. If you don’t know how to do this, I suggest you contact your hosting provider who should be able to direct you to the right place.

Back to the tags for a moment. Your title tag should contain at least one of your keywords. If you have a keyword phrase that you have written your article around, then use that as your title. In the keyword tag, do not fail to include the keywords that you used in your title, plus some additional hot keywords that are also in the body of your text. Don’t overdo it with keywords, though. Try for a keyword density of 1% of the total word count. Finally, in your description tag, write a brief and accurate description of your site. Include whatever keywords you can while making sure it makes sense and is appealing to your readers. This description is what your reader will see in the SERPS listing and will only help in your efforts with SEO and your website. So, it makes sense to have the description as appealing and compelling as possible so your readers will want to open your page.

I hope this information helps you in getting your site optimized. There are other, more advanced techniques that can be used, but I don’t suggest you use them. If you get too caught up in these, chances are that your site’s overall quality will suffer. Just keep it simple, as they say, and over time, you will reap the rewards of your efforts with increasing traffic to your site and more sales. Oh, and one last thing. Please remember why you are building your site to begin with. If it’s for fun, then have fun! If it’s for business, then do what a smart businessperson would do. That is, your homework! Always follow ethical standards and give your readers what they are looking for. This will keep them coming back and you will gain the respect you deserve.