Search engine optimization has evolved with the Internet. As soon as word gets out regarding a new method to rank in the search engines – abuse of that method is instantly in progress. It’s no wonder that search engine optimizers have such a bad reputation. But as in any field – there are those that practice their skills effectively and without abuse. SEO is still in its infancy and there are some basics methods that were true in the beginning – that remain true. But, there are methods that worked in the beginning that no longer have any positive effect on where a web page will rank in the search engines.

Below is a high level look at the elements of SEO that still hold true –

1. Title tags – the page title still holds a lot of weight in where a search engine will rank a page.
2. Content – surprisingly, the page content is not as important as the page title – but, actually having text content on a page that is targeting a specific keyword phrase – can still be beneficial in ranking well.
3. Incoming links – these are links that are hosted on other sites – specifically trusted, authority sites that are relevant to the theme of the page that you want to have ranked high in the search engines.

These are some of the SEO techniques that worked for a while, but quickly ceased due to abuse –

1. Meta tags – back in the day, Meta tags were lines of code that were used to describe what was on the page and the important keywords on the page. It didn’t take long for unscrupulous people to figure out that they could add popular phrases into the Meta tags and watch their pages rise to the top of the search engine rankings – even though the content of their web pages had nothing to do with the phrases in the Meta tags. The major search engines soon caught on to this tactic and began to ignore these tags entirely.
2. Hidden text – when the content on a page was truly considered to be most important – it didn’t take long for this to be abused too. But, how can you abuse content? It soon caught on that you could create a web page that looked like a legitimate page – full of useful content, but it’s actually “stuffed” with keyword phrases. People started to write keyword phrases into the page content so it couldn’t be seen by the viewer – but it could be picked up by the search engine spiders. There are many ways that this worked – one way is by making the text on the page the same color as the background of the page. Another way is to have the text be too small for the visitor – again – this isn’t a problem for the spiders. The search engines had to change their algorithms’ again to combat this technique.
3. Cloaking – this is a bit more complicated – but, if caught; it’s guaranteed to get your website banned from search engines. Cloaking is a technique where you show one highly optimized page to the search engine spider and an entirely different page to the viewer. Cloaking is extremely risky – but there were plenty of people out there more than willing to take that risk.

It is possible to legitimately have a web page rank high in the search engines. It’s not a quick process and if you attempt to gain search engine rankings by “tricking” the search engines – you will ultimately suffer the consequences. The Internet is full of information on how to effectively gain search engine rankings – some good, some bad. Beware of those with “magic” ways to the top of the search engines.