An Overview of proper and incorrect Search Engine Optimisation practices

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) should at all times be conducted in an ethical way so that the Search Engine Placement of the client website will be on the initial page of a list of organic search engine results. These results will in general come after a list of sponsored sites that are pertinent to the search keyword(s) typed in.

The procedure by which a search engine, e.g. Google, sorts out which web sites are relevant to the keyword(s) submitted for search, is by having previously indexed the pages and stored the results in a database. Thus by looking through the index for the keyword(s) a fast response is assured, usually in less than a second.
The search engines use a program to do the indexing, known as a robot or spider, and these robots have been built and refined to identify unethical practices that they find on web pages, which they might well then exclude from the database. In some cases the web site may be excluded in it’s entirety.

The robot grades the web pages by several methods: The number of times a keyword is found on a page, and the number of times independent sites link to the page.

For clients operating Online Marketing services, it is important that their web sites have longevity as they may well sustain many other clients.

Keywords:
Unethical Practice:
Keyword Stuffing is an unethical exercise of repeating a keyword many times in a web page, in general by using text that is the same colour as the backdrop so that it won’t be viewed by a visitor but will be seen by the robot.
This can also be used for keywords in Meta tags in the html head of the web page code.
Ethical Practice:
Ethical exercises focus on what the user experience will be, so the page text should be significant to the page title and the page title should mirror the link that was used to reach it, as well as the actual content. Content should be cautiously written in good English with no spelling or grammatical errors, and should emphasise the product or service that the page is about. Keywords should be part of the typical flow of text and repeated only as often as sensible reading allows. For keywords in Meta tags a exclusive list of keywords should be used.

Links to the page:
Unethical Practice:
An unethical developer may create what are known as Doorway Pages, where the text is probably just keyword stuffing and a link to the promoted web site.
Ethical Practice:
The ethical method is to create significant pages that can be read by a user and have links to the client site.

If looking for a SEO Company, ascertain which methods they use before committing yourself to their services.