White hat is the direct way of search engine marketing and mode of internet marketing through which the user follows guidelines. They use techniques approved by the Search engines. By tweaking the website, or adding some extra words that might attract attention, the user will rely on links, or Pay per click management to increase their traffic. There are no tricks or shortcuts used here; the content of the page is created to serve the user with information and not just for the SEO benefit. Also called organic search listings, these sites rely on their own strengths rather than manipulating the system.

On the other hand, black hat SEO is a route less preferred because it leads to banning of the website if discovered. Here, the owner of the site might have put in content just so they lure search engines. It could be text hidden in the back drop, or placed off the screen. It is also called spamdex, and is unethical, not approved by the search engines either. Cloaking or invisible text are also used in these sites to lure customers to come over to their portal. Here, the user is trying to con the search engine into believing their website has relevant text when a keyword is entered and so tries to increase the ranking of that portal. Search engine optimization through this method will lead to expulsion and loss of rank of the particular website from the index and it will not be shown in the results displayed on the search engines.

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One of the sweetest things for a webmaster is to go to a search engine - maybe Google, Yahoo, or MSN - type in a keyword, and voilà, they see their own website listed on the first page, or better still, ranked at the top of that page.

You can go to Google and type “Guide to earning a living without a job”, you’d see that this website, HappyJoblessGuy, is ranked at the top spot of the first page. It’s just less than 3 weeks since I started this website (many of you have followed it since Day 1, so you know I have not misrepresented the dates). How do I get there so fast? Well, that’s what I want to share with you. And, if I can do it, so can you! But why should I teach you the secret? Because I firmly believe that everybody should have the opportunity to earn a living without holding a job. Whether or not you want to do it as a side income or a full time job is entirely your business. And what do I get in return? Quite honestly, I make HappyJoblessGuy into a very important website that helps lots of people.

I do say that, if this website provides you valuable lessons, please feel free to donate - especially after you have become successful. If asking for a donation makes the information not free, fine, regard what I am sharing with you as not free. In fact, regard it as priceless - you can name the price, any price, from zero dollars and more. In a future chapter, I will also show you how you can place a donation link on your website. If you are freely giving away valuable information that touches people’s lives, you’d be pleased to see that some actually show their appreciation by donating back to you.

One of the easiest ways for you to earn money from home is through advertisements that appear on your website. I covered in the previous chapter how you can add Google AdSense to your website. If you are keen to see it happening, set up your website and apply for the AdSense account. Otherwise, all your success is a fragment of the imagination. I have seen it happening to my websites, now I am sharing this with you so that you can try it and start earning money too. But that’s just the first step.

In order to be successful, your website needs one key ingredient: traffic. Yes, Virginia. No traffic equals no search engine ranking equals no money. Simple as that. And you know, you’d never get any traffic till you get a good ranking in Google and all the other search engines. But how do you do that? How do you get the search engines to find your website?

There are millions and millions of websites out there, how do the search engines find websites and rank each of them? That’s the whole purpose of this article, to supply you the answer. If you’re on the verge of starting your own website, I hope it also provides you the motivation to get started. The reward is very sweet. Not only is there the pleasure of seeing your website listed for all the world to see, you also improve its traffic, and if you’ve added Google AdSense, it means getting more advertising dollars.

In the early years of the Internet, it was pretty easy to get a top rank on the search engines. Granted there were fewer webpages back then, search engines were also less sophisticated than they are today. If you ask me, do I prefer them now or back then, my answer to you is a resounding NOW. Although search engines today are more sophisticated - and there are more websites to compete with - today’s technology allows for more relevant search results. Today’s search engines are more sophisticated than years ago; now they are better able to recognize quality, and are not so easily fooled into ranking dubious websites. The likelihood that someone fools a search engine into providing his website an unfairly high ranking has diminished, and the likelihood of searchers finding the most relevant results has increased. How was this achieved, and how then can we increase the chances of our website to be listed?

The answer, quite simply, is by understanding how the search engines of today work.

There are many search engines out there, but the most popular are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Of these three, Google takes the lion share of all Internet searches - no small feat, considering Google was the newest player in the field. On the Internet, however, being newest does have its advantage. Google’s search engine simply outshone the rest. It was more sophisticated and accurate. And looking at Google homepage, the search engine also appears deceptively simple. But behind that simple front lurks a mighty beast. As a result, close to half of all Internet searches today are done on Google. Yahoo is a distant second, MSN an even more distant third, and everybody else bites the dust. So if your webpage ever want to be anywhere significant on the web, it has to be ranked high on Google.

An entire industry has sprouted up to help people get their websites ranked high on the search engines. Many use honest ways to improve your website but there are also those that use dubious ways to try and fool the search engines. My advise to you is: don’t ever try to fool the search engines. Search engines expect you to play by the rule, and if you let them catch you trying to fool them, they’d throw you out of the rankings faster than you can yell “Google!”

Rather than getting someone to help get your website ranked high in the search engines, however, I recommend that you learn to do it yourself. I may have mentioned it before but I’ll say it again: you cannot be a captain who can’t tell stern from starboard. You need the acquire the skill necessary to guide your website up the ranks, and I’m here to help you.

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SEO consultant services are varied and have diverse services that deal mainly with search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of making the website reach higher search rankings in search engine queries by revising it or designing it to be easier to navigate and more user-friendly to both crawlers, spiders and human browsers. The aim of search engine optimization is increase online visibility. This is so that the site generates more traffic in hopes to convert that traffic into more sales and income. SEO consultants know have plenty of expertise to make this happen.

SEO Consultant Scope of Service: A SEO consultant should be able to provide various services to the client at a reasonable cost. The services usually offered by an SEO consultant includes but may not be limited to keyword or key phrase research along with checking out the competition, SEO web design for your site and other web pages connected to your site, working with the necessary codes and content for the site, build link popularity for the site and website SEO maintenance for the particular site. Other services of a particular SEO consultant may be excluded by other consultants. Other services which may be included are submission to search engines, looking for optimum URL’s or domain names for your site, providing content for the site or strategizing your whole Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Strategy.

Keyword or key phrase research entails researching the optimum words or phrases that are widely used during searches. These keywords and key phrases will then be integrated into articles that are relevant for the site by the SEO consultant. Relevance is important because many crawlers look for this when they go through a site. The date and information that robotic spiders seek out need to be relevant to the site they are connected to. These will help in the efficient and proper indexing of the site and will help to rank the site. This is why content is important to a web site and the same holds true for inbound links to your site relevant links are worth a lot more than links from irrelevant sites. By keeping the competition under the radar, the SEO consultant will be able to see what methods work for similar sites. This means less trial and error when picking out keywords and phrases and other methods of search engine optimization. The SEO consultant will need to be vigilant regarding the changes in trends of keywords and key phrases since these changes can be seasonal. This is where SEO maintenance work comes to fore. The job of the SEO consultant will continue well after the website is established if this is part of the agreement between the SEO consultant and the client.

SEO web design for the client’s site is also a big influence in the ranking of the site and the popularity of the site to human browsers. This is because SEO web design makes the site a lot easier to navigate and load. Easy navigating and quick loading are some of the reasons why visitors to the site might want to go back to it. The SEO consultant will most likely suggest to the client several easy ways of optimizing the web site. Among these suggestions will be scaling down the larger pictures to enable quick loading and making the site more navigable to users.

Having relevant content is also a must since relevant content is what spiders are looking for when they visit a site. A site that does not meet the requirements and needs of the internet surfer will be abandoned promptly upon the discovery that the site is irrelevant. The SEO consultant must also make sure that web pages connected to your site are easy to reach and that there are also relevant links in the site to promote it with other similar sites. Link building will help promote and build popularity for your site. There are many other sites that wish to use links as a way of getting their ranking to rise.

Site maintenance is a necessary service of an SEO consultant. In order to achieve higher ranking during searches, a site must be continually maintained and primed to meet the demands and needs of users and that of the search engine. Some SEO companies use unethical methods to achieve this goal. Using black hat techniques to get higher rankings will eventually lead a search engine to ban the site and maybe also the SEO company or SEO consultant who employed black hat methods to achieve higher ranking. Due to the numerous possibilities of manipulation during search engine optimization of web sites, many search engines have set rules and guidelines which will control and manage the sites being submitted to them. Website submissions are included in what an SEO consultant will do for a client.

Employing black hat techniques to ensure higher ranking can be dangerous for both the client and the SEO consultant. This can lead to being banned from the search engine and its services and being branded as a black hat SEO consultant.

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