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SEO is not a dark art - just by meeting the guidelines means that your site stands a good chance if people are looking for its content. There are however, many different ways to optimise your site and some of these can get you banned. They tend to be called 'black hat' practices - good practice is 'white hat' and some techniques which walk close the to black hat line are unsurprisingly called 'grey hat'.
Black hat practices include keyword stuffing - this is where you repeat the same words or phrases over and over on your page to try and get higher rankings, and hidden text - where you write loads of words and phrases in the same colour as your page background so the search engines see them but visitors don't. Keyword stuffing tends to render your pages unreadable to visitors, and a keyword or keyphrase density over about 8% is thought to alert the search engines. Hidden text is also frowned upon because it can get visitors to your pages under false pretences. Result if you're caught? Being banned, or your pages ranking on the 700th page which is effectively the same thing.
Links from high quality or high ranking sites are much more important in helping your site rankings than just trying to get hundreds of links. Although this may take time, acquiring higher quality links really will help your site in the long run. To find higher authority sites, use Google's pagerank as a guide. The higher the pagerank out of 10, the harder it will be to get a link, but the more value it will pass to your site.
Don't be tempted into buying hundreds of links at a time - it's better to get a few links a week at a constant pace than getting a lot sporadically. And when you do link, ensure that you get links to both your homepage and other pages on your site. Link exchanges can be a good thing, but ensure that you are listed with similar sites rather than just a random selection.
Don't be tempted to fool Google or the other search engines - they will find you out. Practices they may not like and not mentioned above include meta tag stuffing, cloaking, duplicate content and multiple submissions. Meta tags can be useful to your site despite not all search engines using them, but don't be tempted to stuff them full of more keywords and phrases. Cloaking is where you show one page to the search engines and another to your site's visitors - again it gets them there through false pretences. Having the same website on several different domains sounds like a good idea, but the search engines do penalise duplicate content, whether by dropping you from the results or putting you on the 350th page of results which amounts to the same thing. Finally, if your site is linked to properly, the search engines will find your site without you having to submit your site to them. Submit only once then exercise patience until your site appears.
Category: Search Engine OptimizationHow to irritate the search engines with your website was written by:Author:Emma KalsonAdded: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:16:28 -0500 This Article Has Been Read 890 times View all Emma Kalson's articlesAbout the Author: Emma is the owner of LittleFish Web Design specialising in small business websites. See her Internet blog for more advice on getting the best from your website and the Internet. |
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