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There are two main factors that affect the position of a website in the search engine. The first relates to how search engine friendly your site is and this is termed ‘on-site optimisation’.
On-site optimisation
To make your website search engine friendly, you need to keep adding well structured, keyword rich, and original content to it. Equally important you must build the site in a way that enables search engines to read as much of the content as possible and to rate it highly in relation to your selected keywords. This is influenced by a range of factors, including the heading and link structure, the percentage of readable text versus graphics, and the consistency between meta tags and page content.
Ethical SEO strategy
A good search engine consultant will advise you on how to develop an ongoing, ethical strategy for optimising your on-site content in order to maximise both its ranking to search engines and equally important, its value to users. You should beware that there are many unprofessional companies that go about search engine optimisation in an unethical way, using techniques that, if applied to your site, will actually cause it to be penalised by Google in the long term.
Risks of unethical SEO techniques
Search engine algorithms have evolved considerably in recent years, so that they are increasingly effective at determining whether a deliberate attempt to manipulate the results has been made. The result of applying unethical SEO techniques is that your site could be blacklisted and relegated semi-permanently to Google’s sandbox.
Unethical techniques include keyword stuffing (excessive repetition of your keywords in the text or meta tags in order to influence ranking) use of keywords in the meta tags that are not reflected in the page content, and creating multiple pages with virtually identical content.
So, on-site optimisation, if done ethically, following SEO best practice, is an important principle for building effective websites, and ensuring that their ongoing development reinforces your online marketing objectives.
 Off-site optimisation
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