SEO Techniques to Avoid
Posted by Yvette | Under Online Marketing, SEO Wednesday Nov 4, 2009
When working with clients to optimize their websites, we talk a lot about what they should do to increase their rankings with the search engines. However, we rarely discuss the specific activities they should not do in order to not get penalized by the search engines.
There is a set of activities that, when performed on a website, are considered by the major search engines to be covert or “black hat” SEO techniques. When the search engines find websites that are participating in these activities they will often delist them from their search results or, at a minimum, give them very low rankings for an extended period of time.
The only problem is that some of these techniques might appear to be smart from a beginner’s point of view. To help ensure that you don’t step into a sticky mess with the search engines, let’s go over some of the more common black hat SEO techniques that you need to avoid.
- Keyword Stuffing. Probably the biggest culprit is called “keyword stuffing”, which basically just means putting too many keywords on your website. Don’t spam the search engines by overusing your most effective keywords.
- Using Invisible Text. Another area where many websites get in trouble is they choose to include invisible text utilizing font colors that match the background of their webpage. They do this to ensure that their page comes up for high ranking keywords, even if those keywords don’t relate to their business.
- Link Farms. One of the areas Google assesses when deciding where to rank pages is how many websites are linked to or pointing to yours. To trick the search engines, sometimes website owners will get together and agree to link their websites to each other, even though their sites are not at all related.
Stay away from these tactics, because they can get you in serious trouble with Google and the other major search engines. Work strategically and ethically to optimize you site and, over time, you will see drastically better results. To learn more about how to optimize your website, read our free guide “6 Tips on How Search Engine Optimization Can Help Grow Your Small Business.”
Related posts:
