Without the search engines, one could safely say, the Internet becomes meaningless. Just give it a thought, how many websites do you visit by actually typing in their URLs? And compare this with the number of websites you visit by making a search on Google, Yahoo!, Lycos, Ask, MSN or any other such search. This itself will tell you the common people's tendency of using the Internet. Websites are visited in a very major way through search engines, and not by knowing the URL of the site itself.

This is why website owners are optimizing their websites in better and better ways so that their websites come up on the first few pages of the search engines. The higher is the rank of the website on the search pages, the more will be the traffic diverted to it. And more will be the business the website will have. This is the total intention of website owners, to make their websites come as high on search engines as possible.

There are many ways to do this. One of the best ways is certainly to include the popular keywords several times on the website. Search engines index web pages according to the number of times a particular keyword has occurred in it. This is called as keyword density. Web pages with better keyword densities stand a better chance to appear on the search pages.

Another way of popularizing websites is to write some relevant promotion articles (also known as marketing articles) with the requisite keyword density and to submit it on several article directories on the Internet, along with a link of the website below the article.

These article directories have excellent search engine index programs, due to which the articles stand a better chance to show on the search pages. The articles would then lead to the website of the author.

Though there are many techniques for search engine optimization, oftentimes it is seen that some websites use illegal methods to climb up the search engine ladder. However, all the popular search engines are well-equipped to detect such devious means. Once something out of the way is detected on a website relating to search engine optimization, the search engine would bad-mark the website for the future searches.

This is the penalty which search engines apply on websites. Penalized websites will not show on the search results anymore. Consequently, the traffic on the website will decrease drastically, and hence will its business.

This is all the more reason why website owners should know about SEO in the right manner. SEO is not just about selecting a keyword and them dumping it on the web page several tens of times. If anything goes wrong, the whole website could have to pay a search engine optimization penalty.

Websites can be penalized for several reasons. The following are some of the most common reasons why websites are penalized:-
(i) Too little text on the website
(ii) Too many occurrences of the keyword (keyword density more than 5% is always circumspect)
(iii) Too many inbound links to the website from the exact same keyword from promotion articles
(iv) Duplicate content in articles of the website
(v) Same article sent to several article directories without any change
(vi) Linking many websites together from the same IP, having the same types of keywords

These are some of the popular SEO penalizing causes. It is in the best interest of the website owner to know about search engine optimization penalties even before launching the website so that their websites are safe from the strict scrutiny of the websites