The No-No’s of SEO

Search Engine Optimization can be a daunting task; hence many bloggers succumb easily to the temptations of the ‘blackhat.’ Blackhat techniques violate the rules of SEO and provide bloggers who use it with unfair advantage over others.

On the other hand, most start-up bloggers do not know about SEO and they become innocent victims of Blackhat techniques. They are taught to use them not knowing that these SEO techniques are wrong.

Here are some Blackhat techniques to avoid:

Keyword Stuffing. This is when the webmaster fills the site with hundreds or even thousands of keywords. One of the oldest Blackhat techniques, keyword stuffing is different from optimization in that it involves keywords that are repeated in an irrelevant and illogical way.

These keywords are hidden by color blending (where the background color and text color are the same so humans can’t see it but search engines can), or by putting keywords in meta tags / script tags, or even by placing the keywords outside the visible screen area via cascading stlye sheets (CSS).

Link Farms. These are websites created only for the purpose of accommodating unrelated links. Avoid link farms because you can get penalized and banned for using them. Make it a point to know where links to your sites are coming from.

Auto Generated Pages. These pages consist of content automatically derived from other sites. No part of the page is original since it contains snippets of content taken from other sites.

Gateway Pages. These pages are usually invisible to the user and are designed for only the search engines to see. These use redirect scripts that leads site visitors to another site automatically.

On the other hand, some landing pages are acceptable. Landing pages that contain relevant information where the reader is not tricked to click or go to another site is fine.

Don’t try using these because you’ll get caught eventually. Work smart and work clean.