• Section: Increase Traffic - Category: SEO/SEM
• Written by Andreas Sundstro

Search engine optimisation, or "Seo", has for quite some time been the ultimate goal for many webmasters. To begin with there really was not all that difficult, but as the Internet is evolving exponentially so does the competition - especially for any term that has money making powers.

Based on what you do to promote the search engine rankings of your site, it could be summed up as white-, black- or grey hat methods. The first mentioned being allowed things like putting only genuinely usable for your site, while the black hat tactic would be strategies that the great search engines like google, yahoo and msn are not going to like one bit - spamming other people's blogs and forums with links to your site, for instance.

Logically enough, the grey hat methods land in the middle of "wrong and right" and are things that you could quite possibly bring through, on condition that you use the guidelines with care. For your plain vanilla webmaster distinguishing between

these methods is not regularly all that simple, particularly with so many gurus offering to sell us their most up-to-date superior suggestion when it comes to achieving rankings and making money online.

If money is all you care about...

The ethics of the matter aren't maybe as clear cut as some would have you believe either.

On the one hand it's by all means clear that super seo'ed adsense sites filled with no-good text - that could equally well read "ga ga ja da" or some resembling blabber - are of zero value to the committed Internet user, and no one likes to have their pet bulletin board or blog spammed with barefaced advertising for dodgy merchandize that promise to increase sexual potency. As the search engines make their living on serving up relevant and priceless education, it's purely rational that they do nit interpret on these black hat sites and methods with forgiving eyes.

On its side, the Internet is literally made up of it's users and provided that you aren't breaking any real laws, you are free to produce content in whatever way you wish to. If you desire to engineer a blog farm consisting of hundreds of blogs that has zero value to human visitors, there is nobody but time and cost constraints stopping you from doing so.

Those who do this are in it completely for the money - they quickly produce large amounts of webpages that targets any one keywords they can monetize in some way. The ambition of these sites isn't to give the visitor anything of value, but to get him or her to click on an advert that will take him somwhere else where he will hopefully spend some money instead.

So in a way, this is in fact nought but a marketing tactic, and some people are reportedly making a most good living using similar business model.

For the "friendly and polite webmaster" though, who just have the desire to tell folks about his hobby or wants to offer folks real products and services, it is presumably an adequate idea to be careful with anything that could be accused as black hat search engine optimisation.

Not due to the fact that it's morally a bit thin, but seeing that it most likely will hurt his bottom line in time.

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