It’s often hard to tell what search engines will allow and what they won’t because they have very particular criteria for making those decisions. Most major search engines also change their spiders to different criteria often. It makes more sense to concentrate your efforts on a few well proven concepts with your promotional endeavors, rather than attempting to go back to the drawing board each time that you learn that Google has adopted a different algorithm for SEO. First of all, be sure to adhere to the rules once you know the things you can do and those you can’t. If you’re an Internet marketer, you can’t commit a worse crime than irritating or being fraudulent in the eyes of Google. If your sites get de-indexed, your traffic will plummet!

Remember that the easiest method of SEO lies in putting your website in to the search engines via the proper channels. Each of the largest search engines will allow you to fill out submission forms to ensure your site is recognized by the crawlers. This sounds like a wonderful thing, but it is going to take a long time to process the request. Even though it may take a little longer for your site to get indexed, you will find this option helpful if you are having duplicate content issues with other sites. You are always interested in having more links to your website, and this represents another one for you. Make sure you give your readers consistent, quality content on the subjects they are interested in, write articles on subjects like Cinema reviews and BBC Iplayer for an entertainment blog for instance.

When you put links up on your site, whether they are internal links or outbound links, make sure that the link text contains the keyword phrase that you have chosen for your site. Not only will it look better than the “Click Here!” links for your readers, it will allow the search engines to know which links point to which sites. When you include plenty of links in your site that are blended in, your readers will appreciate the ability to click on them to get more information about what they are reading about. Fewer people will be likely to click on the “Click Here!” links, because it feels a little pushy.

With Search Engine Optimization, you have to focus on Reputation, Links, Popularity and Text. If you can grasp the best way to combine these four areas for your site, you will see that you do not need any gimmicky tricks. When you aren’t focused on SEO, you need to focus on these four things: text, links, popularity, and reputation. Do not lose sleep with trying to remain up-to-date on the latest and greatest SEO ideas. Every time a new page ranking comes out, these trends will fade. SEO will be a piece of cake as long as you focus on well-written and readable content.

Joe Simpson is a professional marketer and also works in the fields of diversity training and advising companies on equality issues.