Search Engine Optimization is the creation of a web page, purposely designed to rank well with the Search Engines.

If you want traffic to your website then you must Optimize your website for the Search Engines.

Search Engine Optimization is a necessity if you want a huge amount of traffic flowing to your website.

Traffic from the Search Engines is one of the best (And most abundant) forms of traffic. Most people use Search Engines to find what they are looking for. I do and I bet you do too.

You simply cannot afford to pass this up. If you do, then your competitors will be way ahead of you, taking customers which you could have had.

However, if you are going to undertake Search Engine Optimization I STRONGLY recommend that you do some extensive research before you start trying to create the "perfect" page for the Search Engines.

If you don't do enough research then you will find bits of Optimization information, but will it be correct or will it heavily penalize your website, or even completely ban it? If you end up doing the wrong thing, this is what can happen.

Examples of bad Optimization techniques:

Previously many of these probably worked. However the Search Engines are now actively looking for websites who may be implementing some of these techniques and penalizing them accordingly.

Cloaking:

What I mean is creating a page for a visitor but when a search engine spider goes to the page, they see something completely different. One way to detect if a website is doing this, is if they appear at the top of search results for a keyword that doesn't even appear on that page. This is a major no no. Sure it probably works incredibly well for a time. But when the Search Engines figure out what your up to, you can bet they will ban you permanently.

Keyword Stuffing:

This is the process of having as many keywords placed into the meta tags or content of the page whether they are relevant or not to the "content" of the page. Not only does this not work, it will work against you. Google for example will penalize you if you have a keyword more than once in a row. This is logical, as having 2 keywords in a row probably would not make sense. For example, for the keyword Golf, Google would penalize you if you wrote Golf Golf.

However, if the title of your page was "Golf", and the sentence beneath it was "golf is great because..." you would probably still be penalized.

Colouring keywords the same colour as their background:

This is quite self explanatory. It's bad because you're purposely hiding things from your website visitors, but still want the Search Engines to see it.