Did you know?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a niche area of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and covers areas relating to ranking your website on search engines. The industry is several years old, but has experience a great deal of growth in line with Google's popularity and dominance of the search engine market.

Search Engine Optimisation Articles

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Search engine optimisation is the process of designing and optimising your website for search engines. This includes writing good copy, designing a simple and usable website and building links to your site.

Search engines will consider a wide range of factors when deciding how to rank websites - unfortunately they keep these details to themselves, so the SEO industry is based on research, conjecture, theory and experience. It can be very daunting for newcomers and that's why we have developed this site - to help provide some information for you to work with. If you have any specific questions, ask on our SEO forum.

SEO Articles List

We will update this list as new articles are added - have a look at the search engine marketing and community building articles for related information.

• Adding value to your website
• Inbound link strategies
• Finding good directories to get listed in
• Keywords - What are they?
• Reciprocal links
• Spam - why to keep your site clean
• What is Google PageRank?

What is spam?

The term spam originally referred to junk emails, but is now more widely used within the search engine marketing industry to describe any form of unwanted advertising.

This includes, but is not limited to: forum spammers, splogs (spam blogs setup for SEO purposes), spam websites (auto generated websites designed to rank well in search engines for a short period of time) or SEO spam (excessive use of search engine optimisation techniques).

What's the big deal?

In terms of search engine optimisation spam, if you go overboard and excessively use SEO techniques to gain high rankings on search engines, you run the risk of your site being penalised (temporary or limited reduction in rankings) or completely banned (no more free traffic!).

So how do I know if I'm spamming?

Well, design your site - by all means optimise it for search engines - but don't go overboard. The visitors to your site are more important and if you design and optimise your site with visitors in mind, you won't run the risk of penalisation. Ask yourself, am I doing this for visitors or search engines? If it is for search engines then potentially you could be going too far.

Search engines want to see good content and a friendly design so follow basic web design and content writing principles and you will be fine. Feel free to ask an expert on our discussion forums for some help and advice.