The following is a guest post from good friend and SEO expert, Amberly Stitzel. She was kind enough to share some interesting thoughts on Search Engine Optimization.

When performing optimization on your website for search engine rankings it is important to keep in mind the blend between optimizing for the “bots” and for users. If you gravitate more towards one than the other then your efforts may only win over one of the aforementioned and could have a lesser affect than both combined.

This is where the underwear part comes in. Have you ever seen someone wearing pants so tight you can see their underwear lines? Or better yet, have you ever not seen someone’s underwear lines and wondered if they were even wearing any? Okay, so maybe if you are a pervert you have wondered these two things but I’ll explain my point. Search engine optimization to improve organic rankings is a delicate balance between the visible and invisible. If you can see too much optimization on the page, for example, too many keywords that look spammy, then you may be penalized by the engines. If you can’t see any optimization at all and have curtailed your website toward the user experience, for example, designing all pages in Flash, then while you may not be penalized per say by the search engines,your rankings will certainly reflect these choices.

This is where the blended approach comes in. You want to make sure your website has your targeted keywords in the meta and content but you want to make sure the content makes sense for users. Simply repeating a keyword a hundred times on a page is just like walking around with your underwear lines exposed. It just looks questionable. That being said, having a website that has no optimization is like walking around with no underwear lines showing. It just looks tacky. Keeping these things in mind when you are developing your website will increase your chances of ranking organically in the search engines.

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Amberly Stitzel is the Marketing Coordinator for LeapFrog Interactive. She has beenin the search engine marketing industry for over three years and is certified in Google AdWords, MSN AdCenter and the Yahoo Ambassador Program.