The most important attribute a website can have is the number of visitors it receives.  No, it’s not necessarily content, believe it or not, because even the best content will languish in obscurity if there’s no one around to see it.  Websites have to be able to draw attention first and then give the visitors the rich, vibrant content once they arrive.  This is where search engine optimization comes in.  Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is a method used by website owners to move their websites up the search engine rankings so they attain more prominent positions during web searches.  Statistics show that the majority of people find what they’re looking for in a search engine query in the first two pages, so it’s vital for websites desperately looking for visitors to use techniques to get into those first two pages.

There are generally two types of search engine optimization:  White hat and Black hat.  White hat SEO techniques are basically no different than old-fashioned marketing techniques use to get the word out:  Using word-of-mouth; viral videos; linking to social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter; and creating interesting and/or informative content that viewers will enjoy seeing are all white hat forms of SEO.  They’ll eventually improve that search engine ranking, but it will take time.

Black hat SEO, on the other hand, uses other techniques to try to fool search engines such as Google, Yahoo to move websites up the rankings.  Black hat techniques aren’t inherently bad, but they can be abused by spammers.  Keyword stuffing is a common black hat SEO technique.  It involves sprinkling the same keywords in a wall of text repeatedly in order raise the density and count of the page.  Since search engines have began penalizing websites for using search engine optimization techniques such as these, websites have to be craftier in order to get their search engine rankings higher.

In the end, the most effective way to draw eyeballs is to possibly use a combination of White hat and Black hat techniques.  In order to not be penalized for spam, supplement keyword-rich content with basic marketing techniques such as publicizing on a Facebook page or creating an entertaining video with information about your site.  Gray hat techniques like purchasing links on a search engine (the “sponsored links” in a Google search, for example) can also work since you’re guaranteed to be at the top of the search no matter what.