Every new webmaster will eventually run into the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizer) when he or she is working on marketing a website. This term can be generic and decisive all in one study.

The term came around at about the same time as the Search Engines started to take hold. Infoseek was one of the first broadly used search engines and the SEO crowd quickly grasped onto designing the sites with SEO as the main intent. The first technique was to simply stuff keywords for the sites into the Meta-tags. This design allowed webmasters' new sites to go to the top of the search rankings.

Infoseek and the other search engines quickly began working on systems to overcome the stuffing of web-pages with SEO work. This has now cascaded into an all out war between the search engine companies and those proclaiming to be SEO experts.

This war has those that contend that natural web design rules. You design the site for the surfer to browse and review. You pay a small amount of attention to the Meta Tags and the search engines. The individuals pushing the no SEO work are web purist in a sense. They contend that if the browsers can read and display the web properly then the site is adequate.

The middle ground group will argue that SEO techniques are well known and can be utilized to drive the rankings of a site in the search engines. They will use relevant URL's for websites, write unique content for the sites, write articles to submit for free distribution, and even utilize unique file names for their pages. Each of these is considered natural and common for creating websites. These items also are SEO approved and prevent banning of your site.

On the other side of the fence you have individuals using SEO as their main driving factor for their website design. They will utilize any tactic possible to gain in search engine rankings. Many of these tactics are considered black hat SEO techniques. They will include hidden text, cloaking, spam-indexing, meta-tag stuffing, keyword stuffing and many others.

When the search engines discover the use of these techniques you will be quickly de-indexed, and your search results will drop from the web. Just ask BMW how that affects your rankings, as they were dropped from Google's searches for utilizing blackhat techniques in 2006.

Blackhat techniques will typically yield a faster return on your website design as they intentionally drive search engine traffic. However, if your site continues to show these items, at some point the search engines will key on this characteristic and ban you from the rankings.

SEO can be a decisive subject on the web. Every website designer and wannabe designer has their stance on what SEO actually means. Making the subject even more decisive is that no-one actually knows the algorithms that Google, MSN, and Yahoo use. So, getting banned for black-hat SEO techniques by one search engine may not affect you in the others.