Seeing in black and white

When it comes to search engine optimization, there is a right way to go about it and a wrong way to do it. The right way is called white hat SEO and the wrong way is called black hat SEO. Now, you need to aim for white hat SEO, but it is so easy to fall into the temptation and trap of black hat SEO. So, you need to do your homework in order to know exactly which SEO techniques fall under what category and which techniques to avoid at all costs.

Ban Spam

Spamming is notorious and people across the globe absolutely hate it. There is not a single email user that has not received spam before and had to deal with it. Spam is unwelcome; it gives you a horrible reputation that sticks with you for a long time. You need to avoid spamming people at all costs. In order to avoid spamming your visitors or customers, you need to know exactly how spamming occurs.

Spamming takes on different forms, the most obvious of which is through email marketing. Make sure that you use only opt-in lists and that the email distributor that you work through is highly reputable. Another way in which you can fall into a form of spamming is by setting up a business blog with the sole purpose of providing low quality content that is stuffed to the limit with keywords. Or, you could leave multiple comments on various forums or blogs that offer no quality at all. The aim of both those techniques is to offer links that will drive traffic towards your website. Spamming in all its many forms is frowned upon so don’t do it.

Cloaking your real purpose

There are some website owners that will take their plight to acquire top ranking to a devious level. Cloaking is a way of deceiving the web crawlers and search engines into offering you a top spot because of the keywords you use. The problem is that only the search engines can see the ‘hidden content’, your visitors of the human persuasion see something completely different.

Now, the content that you offer visitors may be of good quality and the rest of your optimization may be sound, you may just be giving a good website a bit of a unethical boost in the ranks. This is a huge problem when the engines find out that you are using black hat SEO to boost your rank. You are using deceptive ways to make your website rank higher than it would otherwise.

Keyword stuffing

Another trap that any website owner can fall into is that of keyword stuffing. It is so tempting to go overboard with the amount of keywords you use in your content in order to gain better web visibility in the engines. However, the engines notice keyword stuffing in an instant and all you are doing is getting yourself into their bad books.

The consensus on the internet is that around 3 percent keyword density is ideal for your content. You can use your domain name, your anchor text, your Meta tags and many other areas to fill up on your keyword quota.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 4:41 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.