Many SEO freelancers that you find on websites like Elance.com or Guru.com are more than willing to make unreasonable guarantees about search engine rankings and traffic. The sad fact is that there are sometimes ways to fool the search engines and get these higher rankings – for a while.

This is what is known as black hat techniques and they can be devastating to a business owner. After the initial good results these techniques are quickly discovered by the search engines and your rankings and your website can literally disappear from the search engines altogether.

Search engine optimization begins with on page factors that let the search engines know what your website is about. The website title, meta description and meta keywords should all be set to the sites main key phrase. If the websites URL contains the key phrase it can give you a boost also. MSN or Bing gives a lot of weight to keyword rich URLS.

Off site SEO is what will give the most significant boost to your websites rankings. Building high quality one way text links has been shown to give the best results. More benefit can be gained if these links are placed on high authority websites with high page rank.

Social book marking is another good source of one way link building. If you have a new website that has not been indexed, book marking to places like Stumble upon or Digg.com can get you indexed quickly.

Another tried and true way to get authority links is article marketing. Creating good content for the web is always going to help you in some way. By using services like Go Articles and Article Base you can generate a lot of back links that carry some serious juice.

These whit hat techniques are truly the best way to achieve the rankings you are trying for. Don’t mess around with black hat gimmicks, it will only hurt you in the end. I have outlined several ways to enhance your rankings legitimately. So get to work.