Recently we have been getting inundated with emails from webmasters requesting specific search engine optimisation advice on specific aspects of SE performance of their websites.

Now at HelpMySEO we love to hear from you. Emails are a direct form of communication, they help us shape some of the content we supply and they help us plan for the future direction of the website. In all this there were, however, also a few disturbing requests. Disturbing because they were asking for specific ways to game a search engine and I have to say that as SEO experts we tend to forget that we all labour on a philosophical knife-edge: what we do in terms of manipulating the way search engines index a website and the advice we give are so that sites can perform better organically, so that webmasters know how to make their site be indexed faster, so that, in other words, we all improve in ways that will deliver relevant results both for searchers and for us as webmasters seeking targeted traffic.

This is a win-win scenario. We get to own websites that are designed in ways which would not normally help their SEO and we learn how to make them perform better and those looking for these sites find them faster. All this works when you think of it as facilitating search engines in their work which means we help them do what they should be doing anyway. The moment we forget this and start gaming them in ways that artificially manipulate the way they see our websites so we get high volume traffic we slip into the grey area that’s the boundary between White Hat SEO (which is what we do) and Black Hat SEO (which is despicable as it’s sheer lying).

Creating true added-value content will get you hits, links and SEO juice. In HelpMySEO we focus on techniques which will help you to genuinely make your website sign in search engine results. You could, I guess, try out all our tips and make a site that is not really that good perform well above its worth but you will be fighting a losing battle. Eventually your site will fall.

Concentrate, instead, of using the good quality content you have and showcase it in the way we tell you. Optimise your website in exactly the way we tell you and you will find that your website performs well, continues to perform well and you will find that in terms of SEO the workload of what you have to do will only get less.