On-page search engine optimization is certainly one of the key methods if a website owner want to improve the results for his or her website’s searchability. But, on-page SEO often entails technical skills. Why? Not a lot of people are HTML enthusiasts. This is often what needs to be tweaked to do an brilliant job in optimizing web pages.

What if a geek friend already did the on-page optimization and now you want to know how you can contribute to the “search engine goodness” of your website? Off-page optimization is the next step. And the results you will have to pine for are one-way backlinks. Why? This is how many of the major search engines such Google, Yahoo! and MSN rank websites. The more backlinks from relevant sites with excellent page rank, the merrier.

So how exactly do you gather backlinks? It’s not an simple task but it’s certainly less nerve-wracking than HTML if you are not the techie type. Here are some off-page SEO tips:

1. Article Marketing

Quality content has been learned to be real king. Everyone is hungry for fresh and quality info and providing it will make backlinks go pouring in. It helps a lot to be a keen writer to be successful on this endeavor. Also, practise the proper way of using a resource box. It should only include a website that contains information relevant to the article you submit to article directories.

2. Forum Participation

Look for forums that are relevant to your website’s content and keep on sharing information that will be indispensable for the members of the forums. Your signature or that tag-along message at the last part of each of your posts is what will work for your off-page SEO campaign. Keep it simple and make sure that it conveys something about your website. Learn how to hyperlink to make it simple for the people who want to visit your site.

3. Blogging

Blogs or web logs are now the most well loved weapons of SEO experts. Aside from being simple-to-update, they don’t require a too formal tone, which is what many readers are into. Informal dialog which can be accomplished through readers leaving comments and the blog author replying to the comments is what also keeps blogs fresh and search engine friendly. Maintaining a blog that’s again relevant to your website’s content will keep the search engines in touch with your site. Don’t forget to have a link on your main website from your blog.

The secret to be successful in carrying out these off-page SEO methods is to be consistent. Submitting quality articles to websites at least two to three times a week and regularly producing content for your personalized blog is a surefire way to make your website stand out. Forum participation should also be something done more frequently since it will not only help you up your website’s popularity with the search engines but also make you learn new stuff from other forum members’ participation. Also, if you learn that you don’t delight in these stuff, there’s always a plot B – hire someone to do them for you!

Note: This article may be freely reproduced as long as the AUTHOR’S resource box at the bottom of this article is included and all links must be Active/Linkable with no syntax changes.

As with any other business practice, Search Engine Optimization can be performed within or without the boundaries of accepted business ethics. White hat SEO is optimization that follows the guidelines set forth by search engines. Black hat SEO intentionally undermines these guidelines.

For those who haven’t heard, for the past year or two some have labeled different forms of search engine optimization by different hat colors. Those who practice what some refer to as “ethical” SEO are the White Hats (like the excellent guys in the movies), and those who some refer to as “spammers” are the Black Hats (like the terrible guys in the movies). Those who are not quite as pure as the driven snow but who aren’t quite as… umm… aggressive as a full-fledged “search engine spammer” are sometimes referred to as Gray Hats.
There are various new shades added to the list:
Dark Inky Black Hat SEO: So evil he’s a typo squatter installing spyware. Plain illegal, too.
Charcoal Hat SEO: Optimizes really unrelated pages for all kinds of queries, but within the bounds of legality.
Dark Gray Hat SEO: This SEO is e.g. a splogger stealing content from other sites. (What, that’s better than charcoal?)
Slate Gray Hat SEO: An SEO making link farms and such.
Gray Hat SEO: An SEO who really reads the search engine’s webmaster guidelines, but then tries as much “evil” as she can get away with.
Light Gray Hat SEO: This SEO makes original content (lots of it), but the content is still only aimed at search engines.
Off-White Hat SEO: This guy not only ensures the site is indexable – he’ll also make sure to get lots of backlinks from friends.
White Hat SEO: This person puts up the content that people are really searching for, and prepares the site to make it very accessible. White Hat SEOs only optimize those of their pages they deem worthy to be ranking top in search engines.
Luminescent Pearly White Hat SEO: Not only does this SEO do everything the White Hat SEO does, the LPW Hat SEO also makes sure pages will not show up for irrelevant queries.

But are these marks helping anyone, and do they really mean anything? Certainly, the SEO methods I use would place me into the White Hat category. Does this make me better than those in the Black Hat category? I guess the question would be, better at what? It doesn’t make me a better person, nor does it necessarily make me a better SEO. It might make me better at not getting a site banned from the search engines, but then again, most Black Hats know that their sites will eventually get banned and have figured that into their business model. So it’s not really a question of excellent or terrible, like the hats seem to imply.

White hat SEO includes:
Increasing keyword density within text in a relatively natural manner
Designing keyword friendly Titles, Meta Tags, Meta Descriptions, Headers, and Alt text for your site
Natural linking between your site and similar sites
Developing new, link-friendly content for your site

Both White Hat and Black Hat SEOs have their place. Lots of people are indeed looking for the types of products and services that Black Hatters specialize in. There is a huge demand for their black magic. As much as I despise lousy search results, as long as the Black Hats are doing their thing to the types of sites that I wouldn’t be seeking out anyway, then it really doesn’t bother me; it’s the search engines’ problem to get rid of it.
The vital thing to note, but, is that most sites don’t need to resort to Black Hat SEO.
There are certain advantages to cutting corners and utilizing black hat SEO, mainly that your page will increase dramatically in Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rank within a relatively brief amount of time. But, search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) are constantly updating their algorithms to detect and penalize black hat SEO.

Formerly, it was common practice in black hat SEO to make hidden text within web pages. This text increased keyword density without making phony sounding text. For instance, if I wanted to increase my keyword density for copywriting I could simply insert the following line at the bottom of my text:
Then I could change the text font color to white and “presto” the text disappears — my keyword density for copywriting increases but my visible text remains the same.
It all depends on what the Website owner’s goal is. Do they want quick fixes and throwaway domains for the chance of a temporary huge payoff, or do they want a stable business that takes a lot of time and energy, but which pays off handsomely over time? Neither one is necessarily right or incorrect — just different. It’s just like the stock market or gambling in many ways. If you’re willing to be extremely aggressive, there’s a chance you’ll make a ton of money. But, there’s usually even more of a chance that you’ll lose a ton also. It really comes down to how much of a gambler you are.

Fortunately, this basic black hat practice is no longer viable, as search engines have developed methods to detect ‘keyword spam’ and same-color text. Websites with such black hat tactics are not only recognized by the search engines as black hat sites, but are penalized and often completely removed from SERPs. If this happens to your page, it can take months or years to regain your ranking.

Most current black hat SEO takes place on the design or programming side of website development. These tactics include:
Cloaking — Showing a different page to search engines than to site visitors
Duplicating content — making numerous copies of web pages in order to increase page rank
Link Farming — Buying into ‘link farms’, sites with no other intention than to increase your links unnaturally
Page jacking — Copying and pasting text from other websites and using it as your own

fIs Black Hat SEO worth the Risk? In my mind, no. You may get away with it and it will be very lucrative for you to quickly climb the SERPs. But, keep in mind that competitors and Search Engines are extremely suspicious of quick-climbing websites. If your site is found to have black hat SEO, it will be severely penalized by if not completely removed from the search engine.

For a company looking for long-term success, there is absolutely no reason to gamble with their site. But seriously, even though it may take more lead-time, the White Hat method is a lot less stressful, and quite frankly a whole lot simpler.

You completed a web site for your business about three months ago, but you are still not seeing very many people visiting your web site. You do a small research and find that your web site is buried about ten pages deep on all of the major search engines. It seems that you have made a very nice web site, but it is not optimized for search engines, so your page rank is very low. Search engine optimization has become a very large field for many different consultants all over the internet. But the techniques needed to optimize your web site for search engines are not very hard to implement on your web site all by yourself. Here are a few of the most vital things that you can do for search engine optimization:

Use keywords throughout your web site. – Many people do a excellent job putting a excellent description and group of keywords in their meta tags, but they do not use these same keywords throughout the rest of their web site. You must continue to use your keywords throughout the content on the rest of your web site if you want to get high search engine rankings.

Make a sitemap – Many search engines will try to index your site’s pages by following links to all of the different pages. But if a search engine is unable to follow a link, then a page might not get included in the search engine’s results. To make sure all of your pages get indexed, make sure that you have a text-based sitemap that includes all of the major pages of your web site.

Use Flash sparingly – Flash is a very clean technology and it has its place on the web. But you do not want to overuse Flash, because a search engine will not be able to read the text that is embedded in the Flash elements, which could hurt your ranking if you have keywords in that area.

Get inbound links – One of the best things that you can do for search engine optimization is to get inbound links to your web site. If you are able to get high quality web sites that relate to your business to link to your web site, then your search engine ranking is sure to climb.