The only real important thing you need to generate legitimate money online, is traffic. It's the blood that any online business needs to flourish and survive. Search engines offer the best kind of well targeted traffic that so many desperately seek every single day. It's no surprise that a lot of marketing websites are designed to be more attractive to the search engines rather than towards their potential customers. Search engine algorithms still remain mysterious and are a closely guarded secret in the industry. So, what really makes search engines happy?

Through all of our efforts to use SEO to improve our ranking, we often forget why search engines exist at all. The search engine's main function is to display the most relevant search result for every inquiry made through their service. So, it's actually in the search engine's best interest that no one manipulates their rankings through SEO techniques to ensure that the people using their service get the most relevant search results possible. Obviously, this doesn't happen the way the search engine companies want them to and they really can't penalize most websites for it. However, they can and will penalize those websites that are using deceptive SEO strategies that are used only to fool the search engines. These strategies are know as Black Hat SEO techniques, and if caught using them, you can get your site removed from the search engine indexes.

Some examples of Black Hat SEO are: Linkfarms(massive linking with other sites in a group where the only goal is to increase link popularity), creating web pages with duplicate content, overuse of keywords, cloaking(purposely giving search engine spiders different pages than visitors see) and hiding text from visitors that only spiders can read. These are a few of the controversial methods that people are using to manipulate the search engines. Some of these techniques will drop your ranking significantly and others can get you banned. Search engines don't want to be manipulated to this extent. If they find out, you will be penalized.

It's important to understand how search engines work if you want your site to rank well. Algorithms are the mathematical formulas that search engines use to figure out how to rank a web page for a particular search term. These formulas are a well kept secret in the search engine industry. Nobody really understands how their ranking system works, but they do vary with each search company. We know that these algorithms are constantly changing, especially to combat unethical and over abused SEO methods. SEO strategies that are effective today, may not work well the next day. It's a good idea to stick to the basic fundamentals of SEO that have been time tested.

Search engines are constantly looking for methods to deliver better search results to their users. Instead of focusing on methods to trick search engines, it's much safer and more rewarding to concentrate on developing relevant content for your website. You won't ever get penalized if you do this. Place yourself in the search engine's position. They want to give searchers the most relevant search results possible, so give them lots of relevant content on your site. Using bad tricks can get you penalized and cause you to lose a lot of valuable traffic for your online business. You should focus more on consistently developing your website with quality content and stay away from dirty SEO tricks. This is the true way to the search engine's heart and it always will be. Good luck to you and your success!