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A friend of mine likes to say that what I do, search engine optimization, is “tricking the search engines.

The truth is that what I do and what most every good search engine optimization expert who engages in legitimate “white hat” seo does is study the search engines. How many people do you know who have poured over Google’s search patents? Probably not many, but I’d be willing to bet that 80 - 90% of search engine optimization experts worth their salt have read one or more Google patents in their entirety.

We have also analyzed, debated and reanalyzed search results. We have examined numerous factors of numerous first page placements. We understand that there is not one thing that gets a page to the top of the search engine results there are numerous things.

When we get competitive, and search engine optimization is about competing with other Web sites, we have analyzed the Web sites ahead of ours or our clients and tried to out perform them.

We know where to go for links and where not to go. We know what will get you banned from a search engine’s index and what is not only tolerated but appreciated by the search engines and we help our client’s understand this as well.

The truth is that search engines are all about recognizing the positive efforts of Web site owners. They want to promote your site if it is a quality site and they want to keep it down if it is junk. As search engine optimization experts our job is to create and promote quality content then make sure that it matches the criteria as we understand it for high search placement.

That’s not to say that no search engine optimizers try and trick search engines, but those that do are playing with fire and if your optimizer talks about how to trick the search engines I have one piece of advice for you. Take your site and run. They do not care about your long-term results if they intend to trick the search engines.