The most common question I hear related to web marketing is how to get higher in the search engines faster. I’ve talked a lot about search engine optimization or SEO at length.

One of the key first steps is to make sure the search engines know what content you have. Having clear paths for your content on your website with links throughout makes a big difference for the search engines. However, sometimes, that’s not enough.

Submitting your site map to your search engine of choice will make a big difference in the performance of your website in the search engines. A sitemap is a way to tell the search engine some key information about your website.

The key here is that the sitemap for a search engine isn’t the same thing as a site map for users. You’ll need to make sure your sitemap is created in an appropriate XML format. For this Monday Marketing post, I’ll just focus on Google. The format is usually the same for other search engines but Google is the most important.

To learn how to format your sitemap, Google has a post on creating sitemaps that is helpful. You can also try a free conversion service like XML Sitemaps Sitemap Generator.

You'll then need to create an account at Google Webmasters Tools. I won't go through the details here of how to get it set up because Google's directions are pretty good and they change every so often.

Some of the benefits associated with submitting your itemap to Google include:

• If your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by a Googlebot during the crawl process, a sitemap will show the little critters where to go to easily index new content.
• Get newly updated content indexed faster.
• Allows Googlebots to crawl your site more effectively, making sure all content is indexed and added to relative search rankings.
• Shows your site’s links under you organic search listing (e.g. home page, about, products, etc.).

Submitting your sitemap to search engines is generally an all around good idea and certainly doesn’t hurt. If anything, it will help you reach higher rankings on search engine results pages. After you have Google done, go and do the same with Bing, Yahoo! and any other search engine you'd like to see results in.

In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), link building is an important part of getting to the top of the search engines. When you are developing your link building strategy, it is important to be very proactive in your approach rather than just allowing it to happen naturally.

As you are considering the myriad tactics to gain links, you'll want to look at building efficiencies in your approach. It can be time consuming and ineffective if you take more time than necessary looking for links in all the wrong places.

For this very reason it is important to identify the mass amount of junk that is posted every day to various websites detailing ways of “link building.” This post will focus on what are some of the most effective link building strategies that are white hat (legitimate in Google’s eyes) and don’t spam your email or websites.

• Internal Links – These links allow your site visitors to traverse to different pages on your website. They are links in your menu, footer and other areas of your site. In addition to your site visitors moving from page to page, the bots in charge of indexing your site also need this ability. Although it will not really affect your ranking per se, it will make it easier for the search engines to know all the content you have.
• Manual Link Submission – There are many websites that will offer free links to your website. You'll have to do some research because you are looking for websites that are relevant to you have a reason to submit. Stay away from those that are asking for a reciprocal link. A one-way link to you is best.
• SEO Directories – These directories are beginning to fall out of favor. Sometimes Google even considers them a link farm and has started cracking down. In our practice, we do this significantly less than we used to. Do your research to know if these make sense for you.
• Viral Campaigns – If executed properly, viral content can be great in creating an effective link building campaign. It draws links from other websites, which will get promoted in many other areas without your push. Sometimes the right image, video or article will create enough buzz that your website will be linked many times over.
• Contributing – If you contribute you work to other web locations, they will link back to you. Sometimes that is as simple as writing an article for a magazine, providing commentary on blogs or participating in forums. The more active you are in giving away information, the more links you'll find coming to your website.
• Content – The most effective link building tactic, by far, is to have legitimate, quality, and relevant content that will entice people to read. Content is key and, if written well, will appear on highly ranked sites, be ‘retweeted’, and start up discussions within a community of social networks.

Link building doesn't have to be hard but it does take time. It's not something you can set and forget. It requires, like all other SEO tactics, time and effort. There is no short-term quick fix.

If you dedicate the time and energy to take the necessary steps to build links properly, there is no doubt you will succeed.

Link building can be fun. Find something you enjoy writing about instead of being a marketing assignment. Just watch your website increase in search rankings.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is simply the process of getting your website to appear at the top of the search engines. It is brand awareness for the web. There is a reason that marketing your website starts with search engine optimization. It is the same reason why you would start marketing your storefront with brand awareness -- if your customers don’t know you exist, they won’t buy from you.

Some consultants talk about starting with social media or paid advertisements, but search engines are where potential clients are already looking, and it is a very cost-effective way to start. More importantly, if you use search engine optimization to generate placement in the search engines, you’ll continue to reap the reward of that work long after you stop working on it. You may choose to jump directly to traffic generation to get an immediate boost, but you should never ignore search engine optimization.

One way to see how well you are doing is to Google yourself. Companies should regularly do this to see how well they rank in the search engines. Of course, these are the only terms you should Google. But, if you aren't found at least for your own name, then you have a long way to go.

I’ve heard it said that buying ads is like renting a house, while performing SEO is like buying a house. It develops equity. If done properly, it can be a year or more before someone unseats you from the top of the search engine.

You have to be careful, though. Search engine optimization is not a traffic generation tactic, per se. It is the equivalent of brand awareness, because enough brand awareness will generate traffic. While in the long run, SEO will generate traffic and, by extension, conversions, your initial goal should be simply to increase search engine rankings for brand awareness.

Your first goal is to be present so people know you are there.

It might take as much as six months to a year for your key terms to start truly generating meaningful traffic but it will be worth it. When you become firmly planted in the search engines, you'll have a stronger foundation for all of your marketing efforts.

I am a firm believer that content, especially on your website, is king. It is what sets you apart from the other, boring companies that compete against you.

While pretty design is important, your content is what can give you the substance you need to attract and keep quality website visitors. You don't want to be a pretty face with nothing inside that is of any worth.

Aside from communicating with your website visitors, the content on your website also serves as a very important component of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Content is what allows your website visitors to find you when performing a search on a search engine.

Hopefully it's needless to say that it is very important that you take the time to evaluate the content that is currently on your website to understand how it stacks up. In fact, this should be done every few months to ensure information is current and that you are still optimizing your website for the keywords you would like to be found for. Since Googlebot, and other search crawlers, are constantly combing the Internet, when you write new content that is relevant to your business, it will be found and available for searchers.

When evaluating your content, be sure to ask yourself the following questions:

• What message am I trying to convey? - The content on your website allows you to express your voice and your brand to the your audience. Are you trying to teach, convey emotion or simply trying to get someone to buy? Do you even understand your message?

• What do I want the user to do? - Adding a call to action at the end of the statement may work to drive traffic to certain areas of your site. A properly placed "Do It Now" button can increase that likelihood even more. Keep in mind that a website visitor may not know exactly where to find a contact form. Make it as easy as possible for your website visitors to find the page you want them to find.

• What keywords am I optimizing for? - Always use the keywords you are currently optimizing for in your content. That being said, don’t overemphasize the use of keywords in your content as the language may sound forced. Instead, let the content flow naturally and speak to what it is you do.

Things to avoid when writing content:

• Grandiose or superfluous language that will confuse your audience. When you make your language too colorful then your audience may feel that you are bloviating for the sake of bloviating.
• Forced use of keywords. In other words, too many instances of the same keyword on the page that will make the keyword seem like it's the only keyword you want. Keyword, keyword. Get it?
• Too much content. Don't use 100 words when 50 will do.
• Technical or industry jargon that only a handful of people understand. Define your acronyms, technical terms or jargon on each page it's used as though no one gets it.
• No clear call to action. If they don't know what you want them to do, the likelihood is high they won't do it.

Writing the perfect content is a process and may take a while to develop. Don’t stress out over writer’s block because there will be times that you can't avoid it. Just take it one step at a time and you'll get better at it.

Oh, and if you don't get the reference of the photo, click here.

Black Hat SEO (search engine optimization). That's an interesting term. It hearkens back to the idea that the cowboy with the black hat must be the bad guy. He's evil. He's obvious. He breaks the law.

The sheriff, the good guy, the hunter of the black hat, is the one wearing the white hat.

When you consider the black hat and white hat, it makes you think that black is bad and white is good. Unfortunately, SEO doesn't really work that way.

Let me give you the top reasons why black hat SEO isn't necessarily wrong.

Black Hat Tactics are not Illegal.

I choose to put this first because this is the most important part to understand about black hat. Just because someone uses black hat tactics, it doesn't mean that they are bad people, do bad things or get bad results. Above all, they aren't breaking the law.

There is no law that governs how SEO should be performed. It's all based on what the search engines say they want. Remember, the search engines are private organizations. All of them want the same basic information but there are variations in their expectations. There is no government agency that will shut you down if you try to SEO for the wrong terms in the wrong way (assuming you aren't breaking any actual laws).

Black Hat Changes over Time.

In the early days of search engines (after Google started) the search indexes were automated and thus began SEO. In the beginning things like key word stuffing, hidden text, link farms and myriad other current black hat tactics were just tactics. They were just what you did to get to the top of the search engines.

In fact, there used to be services that would create links on your site for you to other sites and then create links to your site from them. This was an incredibly effective way to increase ranking in the search engines. That is, until the search engines decided that tactic was black hat. When the search engines decided that was bad, those sites were de-indexed.

Black Hat is Very Effective. In the Short Term.

Until you get caught by the search engines, if you ever do, black hat is very effective. You can get to the top of the search engines very quickly. But, you run the risk of losing all your rankings when you do get caught. It will usually be the websites that draw a lot of traffic and are more obvious about their tactics.

One great example is from JC Penny a few years ago. They had thousands of inbound links from unrelated sites that resulted in their entire website to be de-indexed or pulled from the search engines.

In the short term, they achieved some incredible search rankings. Then, until they could get their act together, you couldn't find them in the natural listings of the search engines.

Other Ways to Generate Traffic.

If your business is based on other ways to generate traffic such as paid advertising, maybe the risk of losing your ranking isn't such a bad thing. Maybe it's worth the time and effort to use black hat tactics and take the risk.

The Biggest Risk.

So, I've given a couple of reasons why Black Hat SEO isn't necessarily that bad. The reality is, like JC Penny, it can be a huge risk.

When you use too many black hat tactics, the real risk is that the search engines will simply remove your site from their index. Our experience is that you have to do a lot of it to be de-indexed and you won't lose some rankings of some pages or key terms but you'd likely lose all rankings of all terms on all pages. We have noticed some instances where the rankings would simply tank by 100 or more slots on the search engine results page.

If you have dropped a slot or two, it's probably not because of black hat tactics but simply because you haven't maintained enough positive search engine tactics.

Ethical Considerations.

Now, this is my personal opinion. I believe you are under no ethical obligation to perform search engine optimization in a way that follows the terms that the search engines have put out. You are under no obligations to do what they say.

I look at it like taking food from one restaurant into another. Some restaurants are good with that while most are not. The worst thing they can do is ask you to leave. If they put up a sign then you should expect you'll be asked to leave. Some understand that your kids may not like what you want to eat so as long as you buy food, your kids are okay with other food.

In our company, the primary reason we don't use black hat tactics is because we don't want our clients to have the risk of long-term de-indexing and not because of any ethical consideration. We want our clients to have long term success and not just short term success.

Where I do think ethics apply is if you hire a company to perform SEO for your business and they don't tell you part of their tactics include black hat tactics. If you are de-indexed because of their performance and you didn't understand the risk then I have ethical issues with that.

Now, be careful before crying foul. You have to make sure you understand what is black hat or white hat and where the lines blur. You have to make sure you understand that something small here or there is going to have zero net negative impact. Most importantly, you have to remember that a black hat tactic today could very well have been a white hat tactic when they were performing the service. If your website still has rankings in the terms they optimized for after a year or two then you can feel pretty confident their tactics were above board.

The Positive.

When we think about black hat tactics, we find that an occasional indiscretion has virtually no affect on your search results.

For example, if you have a few links here or there that are against current white hat tactics, you'll not see an issue. That's great because you won't have to stress. There is no exact number of what is acceptable and what is not but the common convention simply says if you have many irrelevant links then you risk being de-indexed. Personally, I think that's a lot more than just 5 or 10. It's likley in the hundreds of unrelated in-bound links.

The search engines are looking for patterns of misbehavior because they seem to recognize that some tactics have changed because of the expectations of the search engines over the last few years and they don't want to penalize people... they just want to return better results to their customers.

Google has long been the primary search engine on the internet, bringing in over 65% on average of search engine queries. The term Google has become so ubiquitous that google is the verb for searching on the web. Bing tried to make the same move but it will likely never happen even though they are in second place in the search engine market share; they are a very distant second at about 16% search share.

Because Google is the primary source for the majority of the searchers, our company focuses on adhering to what Google wants. The other search engines end up coming along at the same time. It is vital that your business keeps up with the latest updates from Google to ensure that your website remains in compliance with Google’s guidelines.

The biggest challenge is that the guidelines change on a regular basis. What was acceptable two years ago or even one year ago is no longer so.

Earlier this year Google released an update to their search algorithm with the Penguin 2.0 update. This updated changed the way that Google ranks results, which can have a direct effect on where your website appears through their search results.

Sometimes the changes included in the update are designed to kill the spamming that takes place in search engines... you know, from the unsavory folk that try to game the system. Usually, however, the updates are put in place to help provide more relevant search results to its users. Google does this by implementing changes that they feel will target those utilizing what are known as “black hat” SEO tactics. These include:

• Keyword Stuffing
• Hidden Text on Page
• Doorway Pages
• Duplicate Content
• Interlinking of Sites
• Link Farms

These are just a few of the tactics that may end up getting your website de-indexed by Google. You may not completely understand these terms and, perhaps, in a future post I'll take some time to discuss in greater detail. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, you will want to take time to understand these basic no-no tactics.

It is vital that you are staying up on the latest changes from Google so that you ensure you aren’t doing anything that could negatively affect your ranking in search results. Google puts out multiple small updates each year, and will usually have 1-2 large updates each year that has quite an impact on search rankings.

One of the best ways to ensure that you are staying in line with Google’s is to focus on creating unique and engaging content on your website and avoid tactics such as purchasing links or stuffing keywords on your page or in your code. Google will never punish a website for creating engaging content that is unique to their site, as the goal of Google is to provide this type of relevant result to their users.