You may remember last month we detailed how to boost your site's ranking in Google with the help of AdWords campaigns. This month we’ve got another trick up our sleeves—search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a method used to improve a website’s rankings in Google and other search engines. While SEO is all about ensuring your website receives maximum traffic, the sometimes misunderstood technique has negative stigma as ‘black hat’ SEO uses deceptive techniques in an attempt to manipulate search rankings. To better understand ethical or ‘white hat’ SEO – and how you can do better without incurring a penalty like BMW’s Death Sentence – a quick history lesson is in order.

In the mid-1990s when the internet was first becoming popular and search engines were hitting the mainstream, webmasters simply submitted their sites to a search engine. The search engine would then send a program to ‘crawl’ the site and store collected data. These programs are known as ‘robots’, and the process of crawling your website is called ‘spidering’.

Once the pages are crawled, they are inserted into the ‘index’, a massive database that the search engine uses to generate results based on some pretty complicated algorithms. To bring up good search results, early algorithms focused on information such as categories, keywords and meta tags—the parts of a page usually hidden from view that provide a sort of guide to each page’s content. Black hat (read: evil) SEO began when webmasters started abusing meta tags by entering irrelevant information causing their sites to rank well in unrelated searches.

Google was one of the first search engines that made it more difficult to conduct black hat SEO due to its method of ranking pages. Called PageRank, Google’s algorithm relies on links, where each link to a page is a vote to that page’s popularity. Other engines now use variations of the same theme in their algorithms too.

But this alone is not the only factor that Google uses to rank pages. No one, aside from the Google IT team, knows for sure – the secret of algorithms is one of the most precious to search engine companies, which is what makes SEO so hard to guarantee. Most engines use hundreds of factors and it’s probably fair to say that the factors themselves evolve over time.

What works and what doesn’t with legitimate SEO today is highly speculative there are many ‘nerdy’ experiments going on today to gauge technique effectiveness. SEO contests invite webmasters to try and get their websites to rank the highest in Google. While prizes are up for grabs, contestants benefit from learning SEO techniques to up their site’s rankings in Google.

Most contests start with a nonsense word so that results don’t mix with other websites. Take for example the V7ndotcom Elursrebmem contest. Currently being run by v7n.com, first prize is US$4,000. The one rule is that contestant sites must link back to the organizing body, v7n.com. By doing a Google search on “V7ndotcom Elursrebmem” a couple of trends emerge. Blogs seem to be rank the highest, indicating that Google favours pages rich in content. It also seems that the sites with the most amount of outside links also get quick high rankings.

These ‘white hat’ SEO tips can help your website rank better in Google. Listen up, here’s some more tips:

• Always get an established website to link to your new website—this helps Google find your site. In business, you could get a membership organisation or industry directory. Knowing a popular blogger and getting them to write about you is also a good idea!

• Descriptive terms in your content up your chances of being found. Instead of just putting ‘shoes’, put ‘imported Italian shoes’.

• Create content for your end user, not for the search engine. Search engines succeed when their users appreciate the results; black hat SEO ignores this at their peril.

• Add captions to all images.

• Use short and relevant titles to name each page—be sure to include your most relevant keywords or phrases.

• Increase the amount of content within your site. Microsoft recommends having at least 200 words of copy on each page.

• Make sure you actually use your keywords in the content of your site. If you’re a mortgage broker but rarely have the word ‘mortgage’ in your content, then Google’s not going to find your site based on that keyword.

• Use accurate meta tags.

• Create a site map to ensure all pages are accessible via regular links.

• Update your content on a regular basis, as robots are continually on the lookout for new and fresh content.

The main finding is, more than anything, is that SEO is all about content and links. Be sure the search terms that you want people to find your site with are actually written into your content in multiple places. There’s no fooling Google, but remember that it usually takes a little while for your site to be picked up by search engines. Google usually takes about four weeks, but in our experience, has taken a lot longer. Happy optimising!