The marketing methods of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, can vary from developer to developer. In most cases, SEO consultants research your market and try to develop your website to reach a target audience. That is good business. No matter what your market is, you want the people who come to your site who are interested in your product. Internet searchers do not want a car parts site when they are looking for a book about a little engine. This is one of the best examples of good search engine optimization marketing. When they develop your site and optimize it for both web crawler searches and internet searches they try to be sure this type of thing doesn’t happen.

A good SEO will focus its attention more on your target market than on you. That is very important. They will look for key phrases that pertain to your business and will draw prospective customers to you. This isn’t done by overblown sales talk about your company but by putting as much relevant information as possible in the descriptive text while using the specific key words.

But good SEO keyword development also targets search engine crawlers. These are robots, or as they are more commonly referred to, spiders that Google, Yahoo!, and MSN and others send out across the internet for relevance placing in relation to queries. Thus, if your business sells a book about a little engine the SEO will be sure to include images that link to you as well as descriptive text. Further a search engine optimization includes placement in related searches.

Other types of SEO are SEO blog incorporation and emailing into an online marketing campaign but those are tricky. When an SEO submits blogs about your business that aren’t relevant to the blog site, it damages you. When they send out spam emails about your business, it damages you. On the other hand, both efforts can benefit you if handled correctly.

If someone blogs about finding that special book about the little engine at your site on a book blog that is a good thing. Again the issue here is actual relevance not quantity of hits. No one can guarantee a top ten rank on any search engine. Search engine ranking is fluid and constantly updated.

These are methods of organic, or internet user directed searches. Search engines also offer paid search results that SEO’s may use but their cost vs. result ratio may not be what you are looking for. There is a benefit to be sure, but you may not be in a position to take on additional costs and organic searching is the most common type of search.

By far the worst type of SEO is Black Hat. Black Hat search engine optimization includes link farming, deceptive linking, and keyword flooding. Link farming, also referred to as Spamdexing, is an attempt to flood a search index by having a group of sites all link to each other. These groups do not necessarily have anything in common the Web Rings do.

Deceptive linking uses descriptive text to lure a searcher to your site or a link that appears to go one place but actually goes another. This does happen accidentally in many cases, but Black Hat SEO does it on purpose and with multiple links.

Finally, keyword flooding involves using specific keywords numerous times on a page to deceive the web crawler into thinking the page is an exact match for a query. This may include hiding words on sidebars or with words of the same color as the background. As a marketing method of SEO, Black Hat is considered aggressive.