A box of rocks for the purpose of this discussion is a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Of the three search engines, Google is the smartest box of rocks. Nevertheless, it is still a box of rocks, that can be fooled some of the time.

Notice that I said, “some of the time.” Yes, in this day and age of Internet technology, you can only fool the search engine a few times before they catch on to the antics that some webmasters use to get higher search rankings.

What were some of these antics? There are so many, here are a few:

• Exchanging links or reciprocal linking;
• Buying links;
• Stuffing keywords on a page;
• Auto-generated content;
• Creating massive sites overnight

There are many, many more tricks that shady webmasters used to “cheat” honest webmasters of their rightful place in the search results. For a time, the box of rocks fell for them. It took an act of sainthood to remain honest in the SEO game. But patience paid off. The search engines, led by Google, have caught on. Their designers created a few more “if-then-else statements” and overnight, 800 million spammy sites have all but disappeared. This made room for quality sites to rise towards the top of the search results.

The moral is to build quality sites that search engines can appreciate. What I mean is that they are programmed to look for certain criteria. In human speak, they are looking for:

• Quality content that are original;
• One way links to other quality content;
• Stickiness — how much time do surfers stay on your site because you have good content;
• Evidence that a site is being run by a human like pictures, contact me, about me, videos of me, and so on;
• Downloadable content like music, videos, documents, and pictures
• Frequency of updates;
• Speed of updates — they are looking for slow and natural;
• One way links from sites back to your site because your content is good and reference worthy.

Do all this and I guarantee that you will fool the search engines into thinking that you have a quality site. Who knows, you may end up fooling humans too. Try it.