Black Hat techniques are unethical techniques that some web masters use to get their site to rate higher in search engines. While Black Hat techniques temporarily do work, in the long run, they never pay off. Your temporary high will be a crash dive when the search engine spiders find out what you are doing and all your hard work will be a waste. If you want long term, high search engine listings, don't use Black Hat techniques.

Why use unethical techniques when you can legitimately increase your search engine ranking? This is the question which this article will answer. After you've read this, you'll know what techniques will get you in trouble and which ones are safe to use.

Black Hat techniques you don't want to use.

Don't use keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the overuse of keywords in your content. This can be as extreme as repeating the same keywords over and over to try to achieve a higher ranking for that keyword.

Don't use invisible text. This involves making keywords the same color as the background. Search engine spiders can see this text but people cannot.

Don't use doorway pages. These are pages that your visitors cannot see, but search engine spiders can.

Black Hat techniques are cheesy because they go against the search engine's rules. Not only do they go against the rules, they also do not do much for visitor's.

Black Hat techniques do work.

That is the reason why web masters use them. I never recommend using these techniques. The problem is these techniques only work temporarily. Eventually the search engine spiders catch on and your site will be permanently banned.

If you want to use these techniques, do it on a site that you can use as a throw away. If you are good you can get away with it for possibly a few months. You may make a lot of money on that site for that time, but if you want to build for the long term don't do it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

If you should not use Black Hat techniques, what techniques can you use to get a flood of targeted visitors? Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving search engine traffic to a web site from "natural" search results. There are several techniques that you can use to do this.

Keywords.

While keyword stuffing is not a smart thing to do, the natural use of keywords is proper. Spread your keywords throughout the article in a way that is normal and does not look like it has been seeded.

Keyword density is the number of keywords divided by the total words of a document. You want a keyword density of 1-3%, if your content is 600 words, you'll want to use the main keyword between 6-18 times.

Before you write your content, pick out some keywords that are relevant to your site. Then, begin to write the content. Try to incorporate the keywords you have picked out in a natural way throughout the content. One thing to keep in mind is that actual people are reading your site. Thus, you should make sure that the use of keywords does not distract your readers from the reading of the content.

Writing articles to get links to your site.

Article submissions can bring a huge amount of traffic to your web site for years. Write a series of articles, with a resource box at the end containing a link to your site. Search Google for, "article directory". You will find several directories that list articles. Submit your series of articles to as many article directories as you can. If they are good, web masters looking for content for their site will use your articles. People will read these articles and see your link at the bottom of the page. Spiders will find these one way links pointing to your site and this will help your rankings in the search engines.

Linking to help your search engine rankings.

Developing a successful link strategy can take some time and effort. Search engines move at their own pace, anything you do to your web site today can take weeks to show up. It helps your rankings every time a search engine spider visits a page with a link to your site on it. Exchanging links is a very common practice. It is very easy to do. Search Google for, "link directory". You will find several directories that list sites that want to exchange links.

Pay Per Click Advertising.

This is the easiest way ever to get to the top of Google and Yahoo. Pay per click advertising, if properly done, can give you an increase in web site traffic and an increase in sales. Pay per click advertising may seem tricky, but it doesn't have to be. Two programs that you may want to look at are Goggle Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing, both come highly rated and recommended. They both produce results.

If you follow the above advice, your site will get listed high on search engines for the long term with no danger of being pulled. There are of many approaches to increasing your traffic, but the main thing is to take action and to keep it going over the long term.