There are many different techniques involved in search engine optimization because SE’s like Google take many factors into account. There are so many different factors out there that most amateur webmasters find it very confusing and don’t know what to concentrate on. The most common mistake webmasters make is to concentrate all their efforts on content, not do any link building and hope their content brings links naturally.
This can be a mistake, while many socially orientated sites do get a lot of natural links where there is a useful resource people may link to from a forum. It is very uncommon for people to link to a business related site so relying on natural links is a sure fire way to never get highly ranked.
Even though there are a lot of search engine optimization techniques such as meta data, page titles, xml/ html sitemaps, crawl issues, keyword usage, these factors altogether are not even ten times as important or powerful as link building. If you have been on any semi-professional SEO forum they will not even mention these other factors because they are easy to learn and much less important.
If you want to rank high and get a lot of visitors you must be devious. You must think of ways to make your own links as this is the only way you will really improve your search engine optimization in the online market. Even though Google’s Terms of Service say that buying or creating your own links is prohibited, more than 90% of links on the internet were from those two sources. So despite their rules there really is no way to compete without joining the ‘Black hat’ side of online marketing.
Even some of the biggest retail websites on the internet are doing very shady practices like spamming pages on their own website to improve internal links. When they get caught Google don’t drop them completely from the search results, but just discount their internal spam pages so they still retain most of their link power. Why would Google be this generous? One word, Adwords. Big retail sites know if they spend $100,000s on Adwords then Google will not hurt them too much as they want to keep this Adwords revenue stream.
To put it bluntly the online world is like the Wild West only in digital form, the ability to do link building is like the ability to sling a gun in a Wild Western movie. Another important often overlooked factor is you should link a lot more to subpages than the homepage because a subpage article will be more content heavy and if you spread your links over more pages Google rewards you more because it appears more natural.