A lot of people on the Internet use search engines to find what they need, be it Google, MSN, or some other engine. Unfortunately most people won’t go past the first few pages of search engine result pages. How do you get to the top of those results? What are some things you can do to optimize your site for search engine success? Here are some specifics.

Door Way Pages

The purpose of a door way page is to redirect traffic to another site or page. These are mainly for search engines, and not humans. We humans like more content, pictures and information when we spend the time to load a page. We humans like fresh content, new information. So what does the webmaster of a door way page do to trick search engines? They make minor changes to the page and resubmit on a regular basis, claiming new content.

Similar, but different are landing pages. Webmasters will use a landing page to convey more information and list links that are relevant to the page. They are designed with both humans and search engine spiders in mind.

Hidden Text And Links

When search engines first started collecting the Internet as they know it, there were a lot more people stuffing links all over the place. Hidden text and links was a “method” of stuffing your site artificially with content to be seen by spiders. These hidden text and links of keywords were often tucked into the very bottom of a site, occupying a seemingly blank area. Investigating hidden text and links was easy for us humans, we can find it by selecting the area or even looking at the source code.

The next step for overzealous webmasters was to stuff ALT tags. These are the boxes that come up on pictures and elements of a website to give more information about it. Generally they are to be a quick description of the element in it’s context on the page. Stuffing and hiding text didn’t last long.

Now days search engine spiders have caught on, and recognize if a page is using the same color text as it’s background. Spiders scan and index your site with the use of complex algorithms and a monster team of engineers behind them.

Link Farms

I’m sure you’ve heard of the term link farm. A link farm is where all the members of a system are linked to each other by a common set of linked pages. The result is all members having a links page with the other members’ web addresses on them. These link farm sites can have several hundred or even thousands of members. By joining you have instant access to hundreds of other web sites, all wanting to exchange links with you.

The problem with these programs is only the sites of relevance are going to give you any weight with their link. Say for example your site is about your favorite show, and you’re receiving links from a dog training website will do you little good. Be wary of exchanging a lot of links, and instead simply gather quality links that are relevant to your site.

Duplicate Content

Search engines and humans alike prefer original content on a site. They don’t want to view the same content a bunch of times. Only the first of duplicate detected content will be indexed by search engines. The rest will end up as supplemental context and won’t even rank. I’ve heard some people mention their site was banned due to duplicate content.

Some webmasters copy their sites and reproduce with different domain names, using with the same content. They link the pages together in hopes of getting a better ranking, and top spots for their keywords. In reality duplicating your websites like that will ensure a swift ban of your site.

Mind these tips and you’re on your way to succeeding in search engine marketing.

Don’t forget to read about submitting to Google’s DMOZ directory for quality links to your site.