Read about the different SEO techniques by certain web design companies that are ethical or illegal.

Overt objective of SEO is to increase visibility of websites and to help the websites getting web presence as a result of random search result page of search engine (SERP). Using proper SEO, the websites can top the SERP as a consequence of organic or natural search. SEO is different from other internet marketing processes as it is solely unpaid.

The standard techniques are as follows:

• Indexing: Webmasters need to either submit a sitemap or URL of webpage with links to other pages to be listed. This submission may be paid for some search engines (SE). Then the SE sends spiders to crawl on sitemap or index pages for collecting links. With updating scheduler, crawls of spiders are repeated intermittently. Once a page is such indexed in a SE, it does not need to be indexed with other SEs. The alternative is listing in a web directory. This can be paid or unpaid.
• Cross linking pages: Within the same website or between different websites in form of comment spam or by link farming pages are linked to each other.
• Adding proper key words: In textual content as well as in Meta tag of website key words are added.
• URL normalization: It reduces repetitive indexing;
• Creating back links: Back links are links created from web directories to target web pages.
• Preventing Pages from being indexed: Crawling on pages with contents not to be listed as result of random search can be prevented by proper robot.txt files in the root directory of web sites.

The methods or techniques of SEO are of two kinds:

• White hat techniques and
• Black hat techniques.

White hat techniques are more like web development. They have a clear objective to be read by users. They seem to follow good designs recommended by search engines. They generally make no deception in indexing the pages which are same as those visible to the users. You should always pick a web design company that does white hat SEO.

On contrary, the Black hat SEO techniques involve deceptions. These are disapproved by search engines and are named as spamdexing – spam or unsolicited information indexing. The processes involved are as follows–

• Cloaking: the trick of delivering different versions of web pages for spider and human user identified by IP Address or User-agent HTTP;
• Masking: the trick of putting keywords in undefined block text or in smaller font sizes in font color same as that of background.

In between White and Black, lie Gray hat techniques involving

• Purchase of links to increase inbound traffic into a website and
• Increasing inbound traffic to a website by linking micro websites created by the same webmaster.

Make sure you ask your web design company as to which method they follow. We would recommend avoiding black and grey hat completely as these will yield short terms results but are not effective in long term.