How to be a SEO 'prophet' and know where the search engines are going before they adjust

White is White Hat Search Engine Optimization?

White Hat SEO - Providing useful information to people who visit your site, or read your content so that people will link to your content automatically and repost it out of interest and to the benefit of the people that read their material. The motive here is to provide.

Advantage: Long term success

Black Hat SEO - Doing anything at all costs in order to gain position in the search engines. Blog spamming, comment spamming, cloaking (making doorway pages jam packed with keywords) and guest book spamming. The motive here is to get.

Advantage: Short term success

Why you should be concerned...

I wrote a piece on how people spam links into 'free services' (click here for the article) awhile back. Many of the folks that are using this free 'poll' service aren't even aware that the service is taking advantage of them. We've all know the old proverb "there's no such thing as a free lunch..." Nothing is free online, very few people are doing things with a pure heart, so learn to question how the person or service is making money, if it sound too good to be true, it is!

It is very important for a web master to 'know these things' because search engines have a constant track record of banning things that are 'ok today' and considered web spam tomorrow.

SIDEBAR: I was listening to a conference call with copywriting legend Gary Halbert about 10 years ago, and he asked the guy that was hosting the call a strange question, he said "if you had a rich uncle who died and left you a thousand houses, and you had to sell all of those houses, what color would you paint them?"

Seems like a random question doesn't it?

He then followed up with the answer "I would paint them all yellow, because yellow sells faster than any other paint color!"

He had learned this while doing salesletters for the Glidden Paint Company. His point was...

"You have to know things that other people don't know!!!"

And so it is with search engine optimization, you have to think about what you are doing and foresee whether or not you will run afoul of the search engines, ignorance will hurt your business.

What may help you today, can have a drastic effect on your search rankings in the future!