The techniques used by all three methods are designed to accomplish the same goal, which is to improve the search engine rankings of client web sites and specific web pages. The major difference is in the way companies use these techniques to achieve this goal. These SEO strategies have come to be known as “White Hat”, “Black Hat” and “Grey Hat”. Search engine optimization (SEO) companies utilize one or more of these approaches with varying levels of success.

Black Hat SEO is typically made up of shady, unethical and manipulative methods for obtaining search rankings. Whether you agree with them or not, there is no arguing with the fact that Black Hat methods involve a higher level of risk, but can also yield rewards, although not in an ethical fashion. Since Black Hat techniques tend to negatively impact the quality of search engine results and the search engine business model is to deliver high quality search results to users, web sites that employ these methods can net short term rewards, but run the risk of being penalized by search engines and possibly even de-indexed.

A few Black Hat SEO techniques are listed below:

• Redirecting search engine “spiders” or “crawlers”
• Mass-posting comments to blogs, forums and article sites
• Including keywords in a very small font at the bottom of web pages
• Burying searchable content in web site code
• Stuffing keywords into the invisible META data of web pages
• Improper use of META keywords and descriptions

White Hat SEO is considered by search engines, such as Google, to be ethical SEO that adheres to guidelines set forth by the search engine. White Hat SEO sometimes requires more work and can be somewhat more time-consuming, but in the long run will have a positive effect on your sites’ search rankings and hopefully avoid the risk associated with Black Hat methods.

Some White Hat SEO methods are listed below:

• Provide unique, relevant useful, keyword-optimized content
• Well written copy that encourages users to link to
• Clean code and script that runs fast
  
• Optimization of META tags – particularly the page title, but don’t over-optimize
  
• Using the correct keywords in URLs and not in strange places
• Submitting pages to directories and blogs; be sure to read Google quality guidelines
  
• Creating sitemaps to help “spider” navigation
• Providing links and being linked to from quality, related sites
• Using anchor text properly containing key words

Gray Hat SEO is exactly what you think it is. It consists of borderline SEO techniques that most likely won’t get your site de-indexed or banned from search results, but could pose a risk of getting your site penalized.

Some Gray Hat SEO techniques are listed below:

• Including keywords in odd places so that your content scores well for SEO
  
• Posting the same article to multiple sites using multiple versions
  
• Recruiting bloggers to write about your company on their blog
• Trading links with another websites to build links

Although using Black Hat and Gray Hat SEO techniques can sometimes yield quick results, in the long run, search engine marketing companies that effectively use White Hat techniques will provide you with the best chance of achieving higher search rankings and consistently maintaining them. White Hat techniques will definitely help your longevity in SEO, because having integrity and being trustworthy are never a bad business practices.

SEOMOZ is one of the most robust sites on the Internet dedicated to providing SEO software. One of the tools you’ll find there is the SEO Toolbar. This tool plugs directly into the toolbar of FireFox or Chrome and gives you access to page metrics and a variety of SEO tools while you surf so that you don’t have to open a separate piece of software. Some other tools are Open Site Explorer, Trifecta, Linkscape, and Juicy Link Finder. All of these tools are incredibly useful in giving you the information you need to let you know how effective your ad campaigns really are. You can have access to all of these tools by paying a subscription fee.

Another popular SEO Tools site is SEO Book. They also provide a toolbar to plug into your browser that provides several useful tools. There is also a free search engine ranker tool that will let you know how your pages are ranking on Google. SEO Book also provides a keyword tool to help you choose the most effective keywords for your campaign. All of the tools on this site are free. One of the cool things about this site is that they provide their search engine optimization software in the form of Google Gadgets that you can insert directly into any page.

SEO Company is a site that provides links to over 140 SEO tools that are submitted by independent developers. This gives you the ability to find tools that are designed for very specific purposes. It also ranks tools based on their functionality and the number of downloads. If you can’t find the right SEO software to suit your purpose here then it may not exist.

SEO Tools is another smaller site that provides tools that you can use to customize your Google search page in order to make it more effective for your personal style of browsing. This site offers tools such as a domain report tool, server response checker, and SEO cloaking checker.

There are many more sites that provide the best search engine optimization software on the Internet. These are just a few that offer a lot of tools, the most customized tools, and the most effective tools. You should be able to find a tool to accomplish about any goal that you might have by visiting one of these sites and downloading one or several of their very effective tools.

Pictures and images are one of the most important types of content. A customer will be more likely to buy what you are selling if the images of your products are clear, colorful, and help to describe the product. Always include images that point out the particular strengths of your products.

Videos are a newer, more interactive component of website content that has grown in importance with the proliferation of high speed Internet. Nowadays most users have connections that are fast enough to view videos. Since people now have the increased bandwidth they are looking for richer content that they can see and hear instead of just reading text and looking at static images.

Widgets are a relatively new way to display interactive, dynamic content. An example of a widget would be a mortgage calculator on a realty website or a payment calculator on the website of a car dealership. These widgets can provide a service to a user and provide a new source of content that you can use to attract other users.

Blog posts are another way to keep fresh, up to date information on your site. Since blog posts are updated often with current information they have the ability to build followers that come back time and again for new information. This is a great source for dynamic content.

The creation of custom applications that users can download is another great source of original content. If you develop good quality, useful plug-ins for FaceBook, WordPress, or even smart phone widgets and apps then you can keep attracting users for as long as your applications are relevant. Applications for social media sources are especially good sources of content, because word of mouth can help to spread the popularity of your site.

E-books are an ambitious form of content. The Internet has provided an outlet for many art forms that help to expose new artists to the masses who would never have had a chance to share their art otherwise. It is definitely more ambitious than maintaining a blog, but if you can develop a following it is a very good source of content.

Incentives or awards can also help attract users. Provide an incentive to your top contributors. Everyone loves to get a good “at a boy”. If you give awards for contributing quality content then you will have more content to choose from and your users will try harder in order to provide good quality content in order to reap the rewards.

Most SEO professionals today will tell you that content is key to the overall SEO strategy. These are just a few sources that will help you drive traffic to your websites. Hollow advertising that provides no real value to the user is simply not going to command the ranks that good, solid content will provide.

1. Ask to see previous work and speak to previous and existing customers. This will give you some idea of what kind of track record the company has and the quality of work they turn in. If the company is hesitant to show you past work or allow you to speak with customers then beware.

2. Ask them how much experience they have in your particular industry. You want an SEO that has some idea about what drives traffic in your particular market.

3. Ask if they already represent a competitor in the same industry. This doesn’t mean that there will be a problem or conflict. Just make sure that the company has guidelines and principals in place to prevent the inadvertent exposure of your strategy to another competitor.

4. If you plan to market your site internationally make sure they have some experience with the culture(s) and language(s) that you plan on marketing your site to. You want to be able to maximize your exposure without offending your prospective users. You also want your keywords to be specific to your target audience so that your site shows up in their search results.

5. The level and method of communication about your campaign is also very important. Ask when and how you will be informed of changes to your account and as to the progress and effectiveness of the campaign.

6. Develop a clear understanding of how you will be able to measure the success of your marketing campaign. You need to determine how you will know that the SEO campaign is actually performing for you.

7. You will also need to know in what timeframe you can expect to see results. Depending on your situation, it might be better to go with a company that expects results in 6 months rather than a company that projects results in 2 years.

8. Beware of SEO or marketing companies that send you unsolicited email or other marketing materials. If you receive advertisements out of the blue make sure you research the company very thoroughly.

9. SEO companies cannot guarantee a number 1 ranking on a search engine. These rankings fluctuate depending on many factors, so beware of companies making grandiose guarantees.

10. Be wary of SEOs that will list your links on thousands of search engines or that use terms like “link popularity”, “free links”, or “link spamming”. Most of the time these types of campaigns don’t increase your page ranking.

There are many ways to determine if an SEO company is the right one for you. Mostly, it’s just a matter of personal taste, how the SEO lines up with your specific goals, and good old common sense. If an SEO is making promises that are too good to be true then most of the time they are. Just keep your eyes open and do your homework.

If you’re using an SEO company from the beginning of your design they can give you advice on things like the use of certain technologies. Some web technologies are more SEO friendly than others. Flash, Silverlight, and AJAX are all technologies that greatly aid in the usability and enhance the appearance of your website. However, these technologies are not very SEO friendly because they hide the content that is used by search engine crawlers to index your pages. So, the use of these technologies is certainly a plus, but an experienced SEO company can provide you with guidance as to when and how to use them in order to maximize the visibility of your pages to search engine crawlers.

An SEO company can also provide many other services that will help to make a new website a success as well as breathing life into existing sites. Often they are experts at researching keywords and content development. They might also have special expertise in certain market areas. SEO companies can also provide technical expertise on hosting and domain structuring to help you maximize your public exposure. If you want to maximize the amount of traffic to your site then hiring an SEO company is a very positive step in the right direction.

1. When formatting links you should try to include keywords that pertain to your site as often as possible. You should also include as much descriptive text surrounding the keyword as you can in order to catch any keyword phrase searches. Most users search for specific phrases rather than single keywords.

2. Link to other sites and get them to reciprocate. Linking to other sites can drive traffic through your website. A user might be following a link through your website, but if your content and design is good it might catch their eye and they might stop to visit your site along their journey.

3. Use links in javascript menus and dropdowns. This will provide clear text that a visiting web crawler can read.

4. Try to construct a collection of quality back links. You don’t want just any site linking to you. If you have disreputable sites linking back to you it might damage the reputation of your site by association.

5. Add keyword phrases to your links in order to help drive local search traffic to your site. For example, if you have a commerce site that sells baseball uniforms try including your location in the keyword phrase of your link such as “Tuscaloosa Baseball Equipment” instead of just “baseball uniforms”. This will help attract searchers looking for specific topics relative to their area.

6. Make sure that you don’t have specific pages inside your site included as part of your domain name. For example, http://www.mydomain.com/home.html should not be part of your domain name. Leave off the home.html and setup your web server to automatically use this as the start page. By using the page title in the domain name you’re splitting your links and degrading your page rank.

7. The quickest way to get a spider to visit your site is to get links to your site included on another reputable site. If those sites are being indexed then the spider will eventually follow those links to your site and index your pages. This is much faster than going through the lengthy search engine application process. You shouldn’t count on this method as an alternative to the search engine application processes, but you should use this method in conjunction with it to go ahead and get the ball rolling while you’re going through the application process.

The use of links is one of the most important SEO strategies. Internal, external, back, and forward links are all important in how they’re formatted and where they go to and come from. By using your SEO savvy to construct your links you’ll be rewarded with the page rank you’re seeking.

HTML 5 will contain methods for a web master to segment their pages into different segments such as header, main, footer, and links. This will provide web crawlers a means of categorizing the different sections of a page and placing priority on certain sections over others. This will serve to make indexing pages more efficient.

The new article and section tags will also be introduced. These will designate that the text inside is indexable and more emphasis should be placed on this text or data. This will also make web pages cleaner, because it will eliminate the need for div tags and help to set the text within apart from the rest of the page.

A new header tag will also be introduced that can be used instead of the head element. The header tag is similar to the h1 tag in that it can contain lots of different elements including subheadings, links, and even other paragraphs of text that can be read by a search engine crawler.

The footer tag will also be new. It can be used in conjunction with the header tag and they can be placed on the same page many times for each section. They can also contain data that can be indexed by crawlers and help to segment pages that can be indexed the same as multiple URLs. This can help the SEO of a site without having to spread content over multiple pages.

The new navigation tag will also be a positive addition for SEO. The navigation tag will be able to designate and define a collection of links to other pages that can be easily followed and indexed by a web crawler.

The new “audio” and “video” tags may be the most exciting elements that will be introduced in HTML 5. They will help bridge the gap between standard HTML and the plug-in technologies such as Flash and Silverlight. The thing that makes them so exciting for SEO is that they will include clear and easily readable alt elements that can make the content of the video or audio data easily indexable by a web crawler. Entire descriptions and transcripts can be included inside paragraph tags inside these elements that are great for SEO, but will also serve to still provide valuable content to users whose browsers don’t yet support the new tags.

There’s no telling when HTML 5 will actually be adopted as a standard, but with all of the new elements being added hopefully it won’t take too long. Next generation browsers are already starting to recognize some of the tags and web masters are dying to get their hands on them so that should help to speed up the process.

Probably the biggest problem that AJAX presents to SEO is that most AJAX enabled sites don’t load multiple static URLs. Instead AJAX enables web sites to load dynamic content on the same page without ever having to load another page. This is not good for SEO because search engine bots, spiders, or crawlers don’t have anything to read since the text or data is never loaded onto the page at the same time. Often times the text is loaded from a database or an XML file that can’t be read by a search engine crawler. This can be avoided by adding the text onto the page all at once, if there isn’t too much of it, in hidden containers and then showing and hiding the text at the right time using client side javascript instead of AJAX calls. Then you can save the AJAX calls for when the client actually needs to interact with the server. Static pages can also be constructed that contain the text that is dynamically loaded by the AJAX. Even though you may never navigate to these pages through AJAX they will still be able to be indexed by a web crawler by placing them in a sitemap that can be navigated by browsers that don’t support javascript. They will have their own URL that can be navigated by the crawler.

Another way to maximize SEO on AJAX enabled pages is to serve up alternative content. If you have data or links that get written dynamically through AJAX calls try to also provide it in alternative ways that can be read by crawlers. If you have an AJAX enabled menu structure at the top of your page, try including a menu at the bottom of the page. Construct your footer menu using plain HTML that navigates to static pages containing the text that is loaded dynamically using AJAX. This will give the spider URLs and text to crawl, but it will also give the user the rich experience that AJAX can provide and provide a means of navigation for browsers that either have Javascript disabled or that do not work with Javascript.

The main thing to remember is that web crawlers need to be able traverse the links in your site and read the text contained on your pages. If they can’t do that your pages won’t be SEO friendly no matter what technology you’re using.

1. The title tag should include the most important information about your site. It should state the purpose and give some indication as to the content of the site.

2. The most significant content should live at the beginning of the page just after the body tag so that it can be quickly and easily accessed by search engine crawlers.

3. All images and other like content should have a clear and robust description inside the alt attribute so that a web crawler can read what the image is about so that it can be included in the indexing of the site’s content.

4. Don’t build your entire website with Silverlight. Instead only use it for animations or to present data in a different way, such as charts and graphs. Leave as much of the text of the website as HTML text so that it can be easily indexed.

5. Provide descriptions of Silverlight content, which the crawler cannot read, in hidden div containers that the crawler can read but that are not visible to the user.

6. Silverlight is rendered using XAML, which is just a fancy XML file really. You can outline your document source in a separate XML file and then render it into a meaningful format using XSLT transformations. XSLT is just a decoder ring for your source that transforms your XML file into something that can be rendered by the browser. By using this method you provide readable text that a web crawler can use to index your site.

7. Design your Silverlight content to fit beside or around a body of HTML text. That way your Silverlight content serves to support the text of your website as opposed to hiding it inside the Silverlight content.

8. Use alternate text stored in the object tag of the Silverlight content to dynamically render the text inside the content. This gives the user the rich UI that grabs their attention, but it also provides the content of the website in a form that can be read by search engine crawlers.

9. View your content in down-level browsers, such as text based browser like Lynx, that are not capable of rendering Silverlight content. Presenting contextual metadata and alternate text that would make your site friendly to these types of browsers will give you a good idea of how indexable your site is to a web crawler.

10. Use a meaningful application name. This will help a search engine crawler find keywords by just looking at the name of your application. For example, if your application is about the hot fishing spots in Tuscaloosa, Alabama then name your application something like TuscaloosaFishFinder.xap. This will give the crawler a better understanding of the content of your site.

Managing SEO for websites or applications built with Silverlight can be challenging. Just remember to mix your Silverlight with readable HTML content. Always keep in mind how to clearly incorporate the content of your site so that it can be easily read and understood by visiting search engine crawlers.

1. Hand code Flash content into HTML instead of using an HTML editor such as DreamWeaver. HTML editors embed Flash content into the page as binary code, which cannot be indexed by web search crawlers. Hand coding gives you options to add alternate text and hidden descriptions of images and Flash content.

2. Instead of using the same page to load dynamic Flash pages, break them out into pieces and add them on separate pages with the relevant Flash section on each page. This makes the site crawlable since all of the content is not hidden inside the Flash content. If a user’s browser can view Flash and javascript then they’ll get the interactive experience, but if it can’t then the user can still view the website.

3. Try not to embed text into images. Web crawlers cannot read text that is embedded into a binary image.

4. Include alternative text with all Flash segments and images. The alternative text doesn’t appear on the web page, but can be read by web search crawlers.

5. Search engine robots like to be able to figure out the relationship between the pages of your website. Flash can trigger page transitions that are confusing to most search engine crawlers. Try to use standard HTML navigation when possible so that the crawler will be able to analyze the links between your pages and gain a better understanding of their content.

6. Embed the same Flash movie on multiple pages, but pass variable values in the URL that tell the movie where to start so that it looks like you have different content on each page. That will help a search robot to index your site and determine page relationships and content value.

7. Use noscript tags to include the text embedded in SWF files so that it will be displayed if the user’s browser doesn’t support Flash. This will also allow a web crawler to read the text and index your site to determine page rank.

8. When testing your site for SEO you can disable javascript in your browser and view your pages. This should give you an accurate representation of what a web crawler will see so that you can determine the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.

9. Use SWF content to add visual interest to your site where it makes a difference, but not where it might hamper the usability of your site or burden the search engine’s task.

10. Avoid pop-up windows. For example, don’t include a button that the user can click to launch the Flash version of your website because search crawlers can’t see them and will ignore them.

Flash websites provide design elements that are very useful in engaging users that visit your site, but they also hamper the exposure of your site if it can’t be seen by search engines. Utilize the 10 tips above to maximize the visibility of your website so that you can drive users to your site and then keep them there with your Flash content.