"Ethical" SEO methods

Ethical methods of SEO follow the search engines' guidelines as to what is and what isn't acceptable. Their advice generally is to create content for the user, not the search engines; to make that content easily accessible to their spiders; and to not try to game their system. Google, for example, sees any attempt at manipulating PageRank as a violation of their guidelines.

Search engines are concerned with textual content, many of the same methods that are useful for web accessibility are also advantageous for SEO.

Here are some ethical SEO methods:

* Using a short and relevant page title to name each page
* Using a reasonably sized description meta tag without excessive use of keywords, exclamation marks or off topic comments
* Keeping the page accessible via links from other pages on the site and, preferably, from a sitemap
* Developing links via "natural methods": Google doesn't elaborate on this somewhat vague guideline but buying a link from an off-topic page purely because it has a high PageRank is probably not considered acceptable. Dropping an email to a fellow webmaster telling him about a great article you've just posted, and requesting a link, is probably acceptable.