There's a wealth of information out there about how to properly optimize a site for the search engines, but the bottom line is that the search engines are attempting to provide viewers with the most relevant results for a given search. No doubt, we've all seen plenty of examples of sites that are very obviously trying too hard to optimize for a particular search term, so we all know what it looks like when SEO technigues are done wrong. To put it bluntly, if it's painful for you to read because there is too much keyword-stuffing going on, chances are that the search engines are not liking it too much either and it will suffer in the rankings as a result.

While you're out there doing research about SEO techniques, you'll see terms like 'black hat' and 'white hat' and even 'gray hat', all of which are a way of referring to the types fo techniques being used. They're actually fairly self-explanatory - the black hats are the bad guys and the white hats are the good, with the gray hats somewhere in the middle. White hat techniques are those that play by the rules set out by the search engines and aren't trying to hide what they are actually doing with their website code, black hat techniques are just the opposite and are attempting to manipulate the search engines int o ranking the site higher than it rightly deserves to be. To give an example, a number of years ago, a really popular black hat technique was to set the text color to be the same as the background color in order to stuff a page with keywords without the site visitor seeing all those extra words. The search engines could see the text though and the sites using this technique benefited from this at the time. They don't anymore and using that sort of technique will cause the engines to drop the ranking of a site pretty quickly.