Search Engine Optimization Practices to Avoid

The temptation of black hat techniques that search engines request you stay away from is sometimes too great. While these tactics can lead to a surge in rankings, getting caught could result in a drop in rankings and long-term damage to your site and domain. Tactics like cloaking, using doorway pages to influence search results are among the black hat techniques you need to be careful about. Being exposed as a practitioner of black hat SF0 presents a dreaded situation. You could suffer a significant drop in rankings at the least, or outright banishment. And that’s a heavy price to pay for using these techniques.

So what makes an SF0 tactic black hat? A quick look at Google or Yahoo guide­lines provides a good background on techniques that you should avoid. The primary practices are usually simple to identify and range from cloaking which is using programs that send search engine spiders to pages not seen by users to doorway pages pages that attempt to artificially rank for a certain search term by keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is using keywords or phrases repeatedly. Another evil is using hidden text by inserting keywords on a page that match the background color of a site, making them invis­ible to a human site visitor.

Many black hat experts will argue that the above list is incomplete and few true search engine spammers will disagree. Black hat techniques are really those used in excess. For example, it’s not a bad thing to share your insights and comments on other people’s blogs but developing a script generate thousands of worthless AdSense pages or to perform drive-by postings on 10,000 irrel­evant blogs is definitely black hat and will have repercussions.

Clearly black hat techniques work on some level, but the potential consequences deter many Unfortunately not enough discussions on black hat techniques are readily avaiable and that has furthered its mysterious appeal. This temptation has spawned an alter­nate SEO approach known as "gray hat" which is not as good as white hat, but not as dan­gerous as black hat. For example, many strict white hat SEO professionals elect never to create more than one site, while black hats will cre­ate hundreds of mirror sites to link to the main site, artificially inflating its perceived importance. The gray hat option is to create supporting sites that not necessarily mirror the original site, but have unique content and don’t attempt to trick users into visiting an irrelevant destination. As in everything, there are varying shades of gray but sites that add some type of value to the overall picture and optimize the original site may not necessarily raise red flags with the search engines.

SEO is about removing barriers between the search engines and your content. To do this effectively you must concentrate primarily on your website’s accessibility and content while making an outright commitment to its long-term success. It involves a philosophical shift from the mindset of immediate gratification to a focus on long-term sustainability. You must demonstrate to the search engines that your site content is the most relevant and important to a searcher’s needs.

Google alone claims a rate of one billion searches per day. Simply put, search engines are a part of our daily lives. As such, optimizing your website to reach Web searchers is now a vital part online success.