It’s the dream of every online blogger to be the acknowledged king of the hill. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), to be king of the search engine hill is to have as many people link your site to theirs. One-way.

Search engine optimization is a method of preparing a site for high ranking in search engine queries. Methods on optimization vary between legitimate ways like continually improving content relecvancy and ease of navigation to tricks like keyword stuffing, link farming, etc. The term used for people to have your site linked to theirs one-way is to have an inbound link. With search engine giants like Google and its PageRank system, it places significant value on the number of links pointed to your site because it is considered a vote of confidence and relevance by that site.

As stated by Google: “In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.” And a large vote of confidence online not only means fame but most likely even fortune. This is because the relevancy of a site causes it to rank higher in the search engine search strings, attracting more attention from consumers and attracting revenue from companies willing to pay to appear on the same site.

In effect, one-way inbound links are now as good as gold.

So far, there are five effective ways to acquire inbound links:

1. Wait for Offers. The normal way of getting inbound links. This method is the most ethical of the strategies. This methods banks on the fact that if the site has great content that is constantly fresh and interesting, with a navigation system that does not require rocket science, people will eat it up. Offers will come of their own volition. Then you get your links.

2. Play Musical Chairs. A devious way of getting inbound links using reciprocation with a twist. Reciprocation is the most common form of getting links which doesn’t hold much water with page ranking systems of search engines.

Normally search engines can detect reciprocal links, but if reciprocation is layered, i.e. indirect, it takes the engine much more work to detect it, requiring more complex algorithms. The price for doing this trick is steep, though. You have to have more than one website. Some people make a pretty penny putting up links one-way.

3. Apply for Inbound Links. Yes, it’s not a crime to promote your site. You can submit your site for review at people-run directories whose interests run into the subject matter of your site.

If the world wide web is the analogy of the earth, a directory can be best described as a town, where almost everybody knows each other. Any new arrival gets a thorough once-over and the whole town votes to see if you can get to stay.

4. Links for Sale. Some high-ranking sites are willing to sell their outbound links to the highest bidder. Sites that are popular with PageRank or other search engine ranking systems use this extra capacity for extra income sometimes.

However, the drawback to this is that the sites are only mercenary, selling their sites for rent. You have no link-equity other than the amount of cash you shell out to keep on existing on their site. Search engines such as Google are actively trying to dampen these efforts as it degrades the relevance of their search engine results.

5. Be Generous, Distribute Content. Of all the strategies stated, this is a highly effective method of getting better quality, legitimate one-way links. You give other websites a reason to put a link on their sites to point in your direction.

All sites are always looking for fresh content for their sites. A site cannot expect to stay number one in relevancy if they just keep on refreshing the content of their sites once every month. Most of the time these sites will even pay for fresh online content to a slew of writers. For a discounted offer, you can have a “about the author” link posted on the site with your own content. Be creative. The key is to make it mutually beneficial.

Ultimately, with a little patience, elbow grease, and luck. It pays to just be honest and stick with the stuff you like to talk about. You don’t regret eating up the time and you enjoy the process.

Hundreds and thousands of people have made use of the Internet in a variety of ways, each in an attempt to subjugate its great power and potential to give profit and gain to users and businessmen.

However, alongside the aims of these hardworking innovators and entrepreneurs are people who simply want to extort as much money from people in exchange for dubious products and services.

Web content is brought to a potential user by means of either direct recall of a particular service provider’s website, or by blind searches done on various Internet search engine platforms made available by Internet software giants. By entering words, known as ‘keywords’ relevant to the desired information, product, or service, into the search field, users can employ these blind searches to find content closest to what they are looking for.

As is the practice, a search engine usually produces a list of websites matching the keywords provided by the user to a degree of relevance. These are ranked by relevance, quality of content, and sometimes, ‘visitor votes’ that come in the form of a measure of frequency of visits by people who usually find the content useful to them.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a method used by many businesses and entrepreneurs online in order to maximize the potential of the search engine by helping them rise in the ranks of the query response listings. SEO usually deals with organic searches, or those that need no payment to be listed among the list of likely matches to a client’s keywords, as well as crawler search engines, which are search engines that literally crawl through web pages in search of relevant links and relations between pages in order to find relevant content.

Dubious figures in the Internet, however, have made use of the Internet to forward their own selfish desires, leading to an unethical use of the brilliant SEO model. This has led to a divergent field of SEO, called “black hat SEO”. In this method, various deceptive schemes are used in order to manipulate search engines and dupe customers by providing them with websites that are completely useless. This method is also called “spamdexing”.

Ethical SEO techniques also exist in the Internet. Before even going into details, the most important ideal behind ethical SEO techniques is in providing better service to clients, and allowing this satisfaction to become key in promoting the website.

What does it take for a method to become an ethical SEO technique?

There are various ways under the central guideline to achieve them.

The first one is creating quality content for the users. After all, no ethical SEO technique tries to get the better of any customer, or even harm them to the slightest extent. By providing quality content, users receive useful, timely, and secured information when they need it.

In order for that to be achieved, no amount of exaggeration or manipulation of the nature and content of the website is done to lead customers into believing that it contains the website relevant to their query. Ethical SEO does not employ any method that will mislead the customer into a site, and even offend the customer once he or she has found his or her way into the website.

Moreover, ethical SEO techniques do not, in any way, violate any laws as regards intellectual property rights, international law, or spamming laws implemented at every level of every way. This would include not claiming for their own products and services that are not theirs to sell or produce just so they can fool users into providing sensitive information through which they can extort money.

A website employing ethical SEO techniques will never try to exaggerate and reflect a company’s image any more than how it should be portrayed; doing so, in effect, manipulates the customer into trusting a company based on falsity.

Relevant to various security issues existent on the Internet, one last measure of how ethical a SEO technique is lies in the protection of its customers on the basis of privacy agreements. In providing the service sought by the client, ethical SEO techniques protect the confidentiality and sensitivity of the information made known to them in confidence by their clients.

Both goals aim to achieve the same end of profit. However, the road diverges and one must pick one over the other. In the end, ethical SEO techniques allow for users to maximize the profit they pay without impinging on the rights of other people an manipulating others; this by far is the best option to go.