Search engine optimization (SEO) is now considered a highly specialized field and is slowly emerging out of the dark shadows of spammers. It has a bright future with a growing number of online businesses depending on traffic from various sources.

Although, the major chunk of the traffic to the websites still comes from search engine users; the social media sites, such as StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and Digg provide highly targeted and relevant traffic.

Experts are of the opinion that it is highly possible that organic optimization and social media optimization are going to play a major role in the future of search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the greatest tool that helps get targeted traffic to the websites.

Organic optimization means getting a high rank solely based on the merits of the website itself; such as the way a website is created, unique content that is placed on the website and high quality inbound links obtained without having to pay for the affection. It makes the search engines develop a liking towards the site and they show off the site to its users by taking it up on the rankings. Although organic SEO takes time and effort to achieve results, it is considered to be very lucrative in the long run. (more…)

There are certain rules and guidelines to SEO. Black hat and white hat aside, much of SEO is done through keyword optimization on the site as well as generating links back to the site from other sources. But according to some, there can be too much of a good thing. If you are so focused on producing pages of keyword rich content that your site becomes repetitive or pattern based, you might be throwing up a flare to Google and other search engines that your site is essentially spam.

Spam Sites
Google penalizes spam sites when it finds them (and feels like it.) If Google feels like your site follows the pattern of spam sites, you will most likely find your site and all your hard work booted off results pages. Characteristics of spam sites include highly repetitive pages often created as duplicates of a template to increase the amount of content on the site. Content is keyword laden gibberish, and the overall offerings of the site contain little or no value to visitors. Why create a spam site? To have visitors click away from it, preferably onto your Adsense or other ads cluttering up the perimeter of the page. Or to sell paid links – many paid links. (more…)