Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
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There are two types of SEO. Black Hat and White hat. Black hat SEO techniques are liable to get your site and domain banned from search engines when they discover thatyou are using them. White hat techniques involve doing what the search engines want you to do and getting to the top safely and not getting banned by the search engines.
Some people will tell you that there are various shades of grey in between and this may well be true. But, if you want to stay in business and keep your website healthy for any length of time, I would reccommend ignoring any seo techniques that are not very white.
Also it is interesting to note that the operators and designers of the search engines do not want people trying to figure out what works best and then producing that to get to the top. They actively work towards eliminating such sites. The sites they want at the top of their search results are the same ones that their customers (the people using the search engines) want. That is the useful site with good information and quality usable content. In other words they want you to optimise for the visitor not the search engine.
Black Hat SEO
Black hat seo techniques usually involve trying to fool the search engines in some way. For example a program that was popular up to recently showed the search engines thousands of content-filled, optimised pages all organised by category etc. and the human visitor was shown a much smaller and very different website. It may involve stealing content or optimising unrelated content incorrectly or etting links from link farms etc. But we do not want to go there so we will move on.
White Hat
White hat is divided into two also. The two are on page optimisation and off page optimisation.
On-page optimisation is described here. It involves the proper coding and layout of the page to improve the ability of the search engines to recognise the topic discussed on that web page. It also involves providing quality usable content that visitors will want to see and use.
Off-page optimisation is described here. This mostly involves organising the structure of your website navigation and getting links to your website.