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Every company wants to be the first listing in a Google search. Some spend thousands of dollars making sure their websites are search accessible. This process is called search engine optimization (SEO). SEO marketing is practiced by an unknown number of webmasters without any issues at all. However, big problems arise when you employ illegal tactics, often referred to as "black hat SEO." It's usually masterminded by outside firms to lift your company to the top of the search results.

J.C. Penney was on the receiving end of a lot of bad publicity earlier this year when they were accused of black hat SEO. It wasn't Google that exposed the alleged scheme but the New York Times, following an investigation. How had JCPenney.com been able to show up as No. 1 in organic search rankings meaning those that occur naturally for hundreds of items ranging from dishes to dresses? The New York Times uncovered a massive web of thousands of paid links to the J.C. Penney website all clearly designed to fool Google's ranking algorithms. This is a direct violation the Google guidelines. And Google took action with a series of "manual corrections." Within two hours, J.C. Penney went from No. 1 Google result for Samsonite carry-on luggage, for instance, to No. 71. It had been first in searches for "living room furniture." During the same time period, it had sunk to No. 68.

Was the fallout harmful to JCPenney.com? Additionally to bad publicity, the company stock took a dive at the time the article broke. Additionally, many observers expect the retailer's online sales to show a significant dip this year without the artificial boost in marketing. Of course, the biggest single issue in all this is that manipulating the system is just wrong. It's a direct violation of the Google Terms of Service. There are perfectly legitimate ways for companies to improve their SEO; they just won't result in out-of-the-park results for every category.

How can you optimize your position in Google search?

Making sure your site is in Google's index. Visit google.com/addurl to complete a series of steps. The Google index includes each site's content and links. The content is distilled into keywords, which are used to find relevant sites during searches.

At one time, the common way to affect search was to seed a site with preferred keywords. However, search sites no longer give much weight to a string of keywords. Instead, all the index information is gathered by Googlebot. This program intelligently scans Web pages and analyzes content.

This raises two important considerations. The first is how your website displays information. Googlebot only scans text; it doesn't process images. If all your important information is in images, it won't see much. The second consideration is links. Googlebot uses links to find more sites to index. So, adding links to other sites is good. But it is even better when you can get credible sites to link to you. Good site design and linking will get you into a Google search. But you still might be listed way down the page.

Google has a collection of web site tools to help. These are accessed using a free Google account. If you already have Gmail, that account will work. These tools include things like a Crawl error page. This tells you what parts of your site Googlebot couldn't read. You can also submit a sitemap, which summarizes your website. Additionally, Google has a tool that identifies keywords associated with your site. It's possible your content doesn't communicate what you think it does. Gathering this information can help you determine what changes you may need to make to your site.

Google also offers a free program called Google Analytics. Among other things, it generates reports that will help you see what areas on your website are the most popular and where traffic originates. If all else fails and your website is still at the bottom of the search result's list, there is one other option. Buy advertising from Google so your site appears at the top of the sponsored links area on the search results page.

For those who need assistance with their search engine optimization, affordable seo services are available by visiting the authors website: TerryReeves.com

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