Avoid Penalties – Optimize Your Site With White-Hat SEO Techniques!!!

Studies show that around 90% of the overall Internet traffic is generated through search engines, they (search engines) also handle more than half of all the E-commerce transactions. This reveals how important and pivotal the impact of search engines is, on your online business. At the same time, this also means that you can change the way your business performs on the web, or in other words worldwide (as your business is now visible to all who accesses the Internet).

Therefore, to place their businesses in the top most rank of search engines listings, online business owners adopt the practice of search engine optimization or hire professionals to do the same for them. Search engine optimization or also SEO (in short), can simply be explained as the practice of improving your business or site’s ranking on search engines by utilizing various tools and techniques. Getting your business listed on the top rank of search engines means your business will be the first recommended option for whoever runs a search, inquiring about a product or service related to the one your site provide.
However, not all types of tweaking and methods (that you perform on your site) are permitted by search engines like Google (which is also touted as the ‘Search Engine King’) who provides guidelines for site owners and webmasters. These guidelines, also known as the search engine guidelines, if implemented in to your website, assures what is called the natural ranking of your site on the search engines. This type of optimization with the application of ethical approaches is also known as white-hat techniques. Some few white-hat SEO techniques are:

• Quality content on your site.
• Structural or semantic mark up and separate content from presentation.
• Providing proper titles and meta data for your pages.
• Keyword research.
• Quality inbound links and so on.

To ensure that your website stays on the right side of the track and violates none of the search engine guidelines, you need a webmaster or a team of professional SEOs that has an extensive knowledge of all the guidelines and are able to follow them while optimizing your website. A poor or erratic search engine optimization of your website may result in the violation of the search engine guidelines and get your website a web spam label. Web spam or spamdexing or search spam or search engine spam, is the manipulation of the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine. This practice is considered un-ethical and unfair, and is commonly known as the black-hat SEO technique.
Since black-hat SEO technique violates the guidelines for ethical techniques in getting natural ranking on search engines, your website could be penalized or even removed from the search listings of the search engines. This can be explained in a better way by citing an example. In a recent video posted by Matt Cutts,
the head of the Web spam team at Google, he reveals two main types of ranking penalties a site can receive (from Google) and also how to deal with them. The two penalties are: 

• Algorithmic Penalties – They include content spam, keyword stuffing, cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects etc. If one of these or other related discoveries are made by Google on your website, your site will be penalized. To remove the penalty, you must fix the issues on your website, then Google will detect them and would return your website in its search results again.
• Manual Penalties – In case of a manual penalty, the length of the penalty depends on how severe the penalty is and how badly your site has violated Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Matt also added that in case your site is penalized (Manual penalty only) and you have, in response, made the required changes, it is helpful to request the reconsideration of your site. This action notifies Google that you have made the corrections on your site and that it now adheres to the guidelines. You can also do the same for a recently purchased domain (which you suspect may have violated Google’s guidelines before you bought it) or in case your site isn’t appearing in Google search results.
Hence, to avoid such penalties and complications that could harm your business, you need tweak and tune your site very carefully and skillfully or get the best SEO service provider who’ll handle it for you. This way, you can also focus on other core areas of your business. However, keep in mind that not just any SEO service provider will do. Only an expert SEO service provider will always stick to the search engine guidelines and never beat around the bush.