It's said there are essentially two ways to approach
search engine optimising - one has been labelled ethical,
or white art, the other unethical, or black art.
White Art. You can use straightforward
techniques such as ensuring that the website's conventionally
utilised META tagging is up to scratch and that the visible
text content of your website is keyword and key phrase
rich. Encouraging well named hyperlinks to your website,
from well established, high traffic ones with a high page
rank and with relevance to the subject of your own site,
can ensure not only traffic generated by click through,
but also an increase in the page rank of your own website
and therefore higher organic listings.
Black Art. This can take many forms,
such as the use of hidden text, cloaking, redirect pages
and other subterfuges.
Major search engines are apparently wise to the tricks
played by black art practitioners and will blacklist the
sites concerned. As such, many will be deterred from use
of its methodology.
However, there are also the so called Grey Art
practitioners. Treading the line in between the two practices,
identifying the red herrings put out by other search engine
optimisers, bending and even breaking thev so called "rules"
and generating useful, target traffic to websites that
need it.
Let's put it another way. When one of our clients appeared
in a BBC1 programme some short time back, the commentator
stated that "they have a very strong search engine
presence, everywhere you look this company comes up***"
and demonstrated this by showing a live search on Google.
It seemed whatever relevant keywords they used, those
relating directly to the subject matter of our client's
website, our client's web pages appeared on the front
page, more often than not in the first three organic listings.
*** It wasn't strictly true of course, that our client's
website came up "everywhere you looked" - it
only appeared when relevant key words and phrases were
used.
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