There’s no doubt that search engine optimization –the art of designing websites to show up higher in the results listings of search engines –is important. Most new traffic to websites comes via search engines, and placing high in the results generally plays a determining role in whether people will choose to visit your site –or even see it.
There’s also no doubt that there’s a lot of contradictory information about SEO out there –and a lot of shady companies promising incredible placements through SEO voodoo.
In general, the most important distinction to remember in SEO is “white hat” versus “black hat” SEO. White hat SEO operates in cooperation with the search engines, and chiefly focuses around techniques that make a website better designed and easier to navigate. These include optimizing the overall site structure, embracing standards compliance, and making full use of auxiliary methods of providing information, such as “alt” attributes, meta descriptions, and the increasingly important xml search engine sitemap.
Black hat SEO, conversely, is designed in opposition to the search engine, with the overall goal being to defeat or confuse the search algorithms through techniques such as hidden text, abuse of keywords, link sales and phantom website networks.
The summary of the differences is that White Hat SEO seeks to present the actual content of your site to its best advantage, whereas the goal of Black Hat SEO is to mislead the search engines and ultimate the end user.
Before you hire an SEO expert, take some time to research their methods. No legitimate firm uses Black Hat SEO. If you do employ Black Hat SEO, you not only run the risk of having your site permanently banned by all the major search engines, you will almost certainly anger and alienate your potential customers when they discover that your site as presented to them on the search engine does not have the same content as the site they actually find when they follow the link.