Search Engine Optimization can mean the difference between a barely profitable website to visible website which attracts traffic like a magnet. There are a lot of ways to influence the search engines so that your website attracts traffic like a magnet.

Since every search engine is different than the other, some search engines react to certain strategies better than others. Other search engines even have conflicting strategies that react to each other. To document all of these strategies and findings would require a significant number of research and information which goes beyond the scope of this article.

The good news is there are a number of strategies which will work for most if not all search engines. The big three search engines which will have the most impact on your website are Google, Yahoo and MSN. These search engines may mean the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful SEO strategy because they are responsible for over 90% of all searches made on the Internet each month.

What can you do as a website owner to influence the search engines?

We will concentrate on the top 4 strategies a website owner will usually employ to increase their website value with the search engines. All four strategies used together are the most successful.

The Top 4 SEO Strategies:

1. Reciprocal linking
2. One-way linking
3. Multi-site linking
4. Directory linking

The above Linking Strategies take time and effort to implement, as they are very time consuming. Most website owners are not willing to spend the critical time and effort needed for their website to be successful, which is one reason why they fail.

SEO is important because it is the easiest and a free way to drive traffic from the search engines to your website. Most other strategies require some type of paid advertising in order to accomplish.

By implementing the 4 SEO strategies above, you must still be careful not to trigger the search engines into penalizing your website.

Here are 5 useful Linking tips so you do not get hit with a deadly penalty.

1. The Rate a website creates its links.

A certain threshold for creating links is established with each search engine. If according to the age of your website, the links are created too fast, you could be penalized. I had to learn the hard way as I was penalized for changing hosts and uploading all of my links at once.

For example, a young low-traffic website should not normally be getting 1000 links a month whereas an older website that gets a lot of traffic could be OK to get 1000 links a month. As you progress in your linking strategies make sure you keep this in mind, especially if you are thinking about buying links.

2. Having a link to every site that links to you will reduce the value of your links.

If all you ever work on is one linking strategy such as reciprocal linking, you will more than likely never reach your websites full potential. Having a mixture of all of the linking strategies from above will help curb this approach and make the search engines happy.

3. All inbound links to your website on "linking" pages will make the value of your links and web pages less valuable.

The higher you can drive this context percentage, the better your website will rank. These types of links are often some of the most difficult links to generate an exchange for because it requires more time and effort for both website owners.

4. Have links inbound from all different ranking sites.

When starting out, if all you have linking to you is page rank 6 and 7 sites, then you are likely to be sending the message that you purchased your links thus not exactly natural to the engines. Some would argue that purchasing links for driving traffic is just fine and it is.

However, you should not expect the search engines to give those inbound links very much weight when calculating your SERP positions. It is significantly more natural for you to have a large number of rank 1 and 2 inbound links and a decreasing number of inbound links as you move up the page rank scale (0 - 10).

5. Vary the text of your inbound links.

It isn't natural to have every website that links to you to have the same text on the link description. Your link text description is a key factor for how your site/page will rank, so make sure that you keep that in mind as you specify your preferred link text description on your website. I usually try to change my linking information each month to help enforce this change.

When you begin or continue your SEO activities keep all of the above linking factors in mind and don't be impatient. Your website could end up in the "sandbox" if you are not ready to wait.

It is rumored and becoming more concrete that Google supposedly uses a sandbox that questionable sites are put in until they have aged to a point that Google no longer feels that they are being manipulated. Many of the search engines use similar protection schemes to eliminate spam sites and manipulation sites to keep their SERP's from being cluttered.

Go out and help create your success!