Search engine optimization remains a minefield of old advice, outdated ideas and outright dangerous techniques that can get you banned. Here's the main points to great search engine optimization.

On the internet, the information that you read can have been created days, weeks, years or even decades ago. The techniques that worked in a simpler, more nieve era do NOT work now - there are teams of PHDs working to eliminate any tricks, or shortcuts that you can take.

Ages ago, you might have gotten away with tiny words, written in white - or putting some heavily searched term into your page text or meta tags - or doorway redirect pages, or computer generated series of keywords created from the search engines themselves.

All of this is now viewed as SPAM - bad stuff that interferes with the normal operation of the search engines providing searchers with information that is relevant to their search term.

The search engines have recently removed one BILLION pages from their index - and you know they are hunting down any more that are out there. You can try and trick the search engines, and suffer the inevitable consequences, or work WITH them.

Page optimization can be as simple as having your keywords be a part of the TITLE tag, and in an H1 heading, and having the page actually be about that topic!!! Revolutionary, I know, but that's what the search engines are trying to provide!

The "boost" in rankings comes from "off page" factors - things not even on the web page! These are called links, and search engines work on the basis that if ten people say that a page is about internet marketing, or 1966 Mustangs, it probably IS!

You can help your ranking by working on the text that links to your page - if the links say "Home Page" or "Click Here", they don't do you any good - the keywords that you are trying to optimize for are the words that should be in the links, with some rotating and variety.

You can generate those links by submitting to your industry or subject's directory, creating articles about your topic and linking back to yourself in the author box, reciprocal linking campaigns, buying links, posting to blogs, comments in forums - all work well to signify what you page is about.

If you have a good resource - a resource of value - people will begin to link to it of their own accord - and rankings generally rise over time as people discover a resource - so don't waste time creating websites, getting links, and popularity, just to be banned for trying some SEO tricks - the search engines want to work WITH you, instead of against you!