SEO Don’t and How to Avoid Them

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the most important processes to improve a website’s rankings on major search engines and improve web design itself. If your website is not getting great rankings, your exposure to your target market will be limited. This means you are missing out on a large number of potential customers. While it’s tempting to use black hat SEO (unethical SEO techniques) to fool Google into thinking that your site is bigger or more popular than it really is, technology is already keeping up with questionable practices. If you are caught using black hat SEO techniques, you could be penalized, blacklisted or sandboxed by Google. To avoid being banned by Google, make sure to avoid these SEO don’t s:

Don’t Resort To Keyword/Phrases Spamming

If your website is all about selling fertility pills, don’t use the keyword ‘fertility pills’ two dozen times on a single web page. Web copies are only allowed a reasonable number of keywords per webpage. If your web copy does not read naturally, you are spamming keywords.

Don’t Cloak Texts Using Same Font Color as Your Site Background

Trying to cloak a specific text by either using similar font color as your site’s background color or using super tiny texts won’t stop search engines from finding the hidden texts. Search engines have very sophisticated ways of determining black hat SEO tactics so if you want to improve your rankings, do it without putting all your hard work in jeopardy.

Don’t Hide Links

It’s possible to create very tiny, almost invisible links to other pages or from other site to your website. This is done to fool Google into thinking that the site has many incoming links. However, Google can easily detect hidden links so it’s advisable for webmasters to stop trying to pass off these links as legit incoming links.

Don’t Duplicate Site Content

This seems unavoidable especially for multi-product websites that offer similar products, each having their own product descriptions. However, there are site owners who duplicate content on purpose to increase its chances of using their keywords. If Google detects duplication of content, it will simply index one page and ignore all others.

Don’t Add Useless External Pages

This is done in order to direct more traffic to a website. The external page is usually filled with various keywords and/or keyword phrases as well as links to make the website seem more popular than it really is.

Don’t Use Software That Automates Submissions of Site or Queries About Site Rankings To Google

This is generally frowned upon by many people in the SEO or online industry in general. If you are caught, you could be banned from Google either temporarily or permanently.

Cheating to get better rankings could only backfire if you are caught by Google. All your hard work will go down the drain; Google will remove your site from their indexes, giving your competitors a chance to gain more from your downfall.

If you are implementing black hat SEO techniques, you might not be caught right away. But if you do, the penalty could be severe. If your business is important to you and you invested a lot of time, money and effort building your website from the ground up; never risk a few indiscretions to gain momentary popularity. It’s just not worth it. 


 Photo Courtesy By : jon-clark