Search engine optimization is a great way to drive traffic to your website for very little financial cost. As a whole, great SEO will work while you are sleeping, but often times what might seem like a good idea to a novice is actually a huge mistake that might actually be violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Take a look at these completely avoidable mistakes so that you can make the best decisions possible regarding your content and it's success.

For the majority of the life of the internet, search engine optimization practices have revolved around using plain text versions of your content as much as possible so that you do not encounter content that is dynamically generated, like through JavaScript. As technologies have advanced, this seems to still be an issue for the well-known search engines like Google, but does it have to be? In general, crawlers have historically only looked at raw content that is within the HTTP response body, and did not typically interpret what a normal browser running JavaScript would interpret.

Automated web crawlers are an important tool that will help to crawl and index content on the internet. Webmasters use this to their advantage as it allows them to curate their content in a way that is beneficial to their brand, and will keep the crawlers away from the irrelevant content. Here, you will find standard ways to control the crawling and indexing of your website's content. The methods described are (for the most part) supported by all of the major search engines and web crawlers. Most websites will not have default settings for restricting crawling, indexing, and serving links in search results, so to start off you will not have to really do anything with your content. If you would like all of your pages contained in a website to be indexed, you will not have to modify anything. There is no need to make a robots.txt file if you are okay with all URLs contained in the site being crawled and indexed by search engines.

The unthinkable has happened. Your web site has been hacked. What do you do? Where do you start? Do not worry. All's not lost, and you will be able to bounce back. Every day, hundreds of sites face the same predicament, and many are able to get back to their original glory. All you need to do is follow the below steps, and all will be alright in the end.

Driving Internet traffic to your site can be a constant battle. Thousands and thousands of sites exist out in cyberspace, and in any given Google search, hundreds of sites will show up in search results as potentially relevant to your key word search. If you want to be successful and draw people to your site, you have to know the system. Users will only go through so many different pages of search results. At some point the user will feel that he or she has looked through as many relevant search results as needed to make a good choice. As a web developer, you want your page to be at the top or at least close to the top of that search result list. However, countless other sites want the same exact thing. The problem is the methods of achieving this goal have not always been on the up-and-up, and it is for these reasons programs, such as the Penguin Algorithm, were created.