Completing a successful search engine optimization campaign for your web site can be a very frustrating and difficult task. There are hundreds upon hundreds of search engine optimization tips out there. Some are reliable while a lot are not. The world of search engine optimization changes often and new tips and tricks are used to manipulate the search engine results rankings. While this may work in the short term, Google and the other top search engines frequently tweak their algorithm to render this “quick fixes” useless. Be careful when trying out any “hot new search engine optimization tip” because it may end up with your web site being removed from the search engine’s index and your web site will become practically useless. Here are some common search engine optimization mistakes and practices to avoid. While these little tricks may seem like they would help you rank better in the popular search engines, they may actually have the completely opposite affect and lower your ranking or get your web site banned all together.
- Cloaking – This is one of the quickest ways to get your site banned and removed from Google and other popular search engines. Simply defined, Cloaking is displaying different content to the search engine spiders that crawl your web site and your web site visitors. Most people use redirects or different kinds of programming to perform this cloaking technique. An example of cloaking would be to display information that would lead search engines to think your web site is about real estate in Los Angeles but when a searcher clicks on your web site, it shows them ads for Viagra and Cialis.
- Duplicating your content – Google doesn’t want the top 10 search results for “Los Angeles Real Estate” to be the exact same content just reproduced on 10 different web sites. That is why you need to avoid duplicating your content on your various web sites. Worse than that would be copying content from other people’s web sites. Not only is this risky because of Google finding duplicate content but you may also be in violation of copyright laws and could face legal issues. It is very important to have unique content on your web sites.
- Keywords Meta tag abuse – The keyword Meta tag isn’t very helpful to your rank in the search results anymore but you still want to avoid overstuffing this tag with hundreds of keywords. Only list the most important and relevant keywords to your site. Abusing this Meta tag by listing hundreds of keywords, repeating keywords or listing keywords that have nothing to do with your site’s content will actually hurt your ranking in Google.
- Hidden Text – One of the oldest keyword stuffing techniques available, hiding text on your web site is easily detected by Google and the other major search engines and will result in a lower search ranking or removal from their index. Hiding text can be done by filling your background with keywords and then matching the color of the text with the color of the background so that it cannot be seen by humans. A variation of matching the color to hide text is to make the text incredibly small so that it won’t be seen by your web site visitors. Either technique of hiding text on your web site is a big mistake and will not help your cause.
- Bad Links – Links to your web site are one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. Clever search engine optimization experts noticed this and would obtain links from any source possible. As with every other abused search engine optimization technique, the search engines have recognized this and will penalize you for links that come from known link farms (sites whose sole purpose is giving links). When looking for links, you want to direct your efforts towards sites that have related content to your own. If you are a real estate agent, gaining links from your brother’s rock music blog isn’t going to help you.
- Extra Title Tags – Adding extra HTML code to include multiple title tags is known as “Title Slacking” and can easily be discovered by search engine robots. People try to stuff more keywords into the very important title tag by duplicating the tag. The effects of this are not seen by the web site visitor but originally, this may have helped you rank better for those particular keywords.
By avoiding some of these very common search engine optimization techniques, you can be assured that your web site will not be penalized and drop in the rankings. More importantly, you can also avoid have your web site removed from the index of the major search engines which is not easy.
