Which SEO Tricks to Avoid

Mostly, people prefer to see instant results, but optimizing a site the correct way takes time. That's why search engine optimization lends itself to the efforts at getting around of the system, principles, and best practices of "white hat" search engine optimization. You can find many contractors and companies that guarantees search engine optimization services that will propel your site on the top of search engine results.

The problem with the "black-hat" or "grey hat" strategies these companies use is that their success is short-lived. In the end, major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing will detect "black hat" search engine optimization techniques and they will ban or penalize the websites that use the techniques.

This following list discusses the common grey hat and black hat search engine techniques to avoid for a long-term excellent search engine traffic:

1. Participating in a link farm – link farms consists of pages featuring nothing but links. Sites that has lots of links to them are mostly favored by search engines. Therefore the idea of manipulating inbound links will boost the popularity of a site. Most of the time link farms are successful at boosting a website's pag-rank which is a metric used by Google to measure a website's significance in the short term. The drawback is once the search engines find out that your website is linked to a link farm, they would definitely reduce its page-rank to zero. Since link farms often cost $40-$300/month, you will have lost valuable advertising dollars, if nothing else.

2. Buying links – buying a link from a popular site (e.g. paying them to link to you) is not considered as egregious as participating in a link farm by most search engines. However, search engines are attracted the links that are 100% natural. However, search engines prefer links to be 100% natural or organic. In other words, ideally they want all your links to be generated by people who simply liked your site and therefore decided to link to it. Thus, purchased links is an expensive and unproductive way of optimizing your website's reputation.

3. Repeating keywords – "keyword stuffing" or duplicating keywords multiple times. Websites that uses keywords repeatedly are used to be favored by search engines. For example, you have a website about meditation and you used the keywords "guided meditation" 45 times. It would rank higher that websites that only used the same keywords 4 times. Now search engines will likely reduce the relevance of sites that use keywords too frequently. However, this does not stop unethical or uninformed people, claiming to be search engine experts, from encouraging others to overuse keywords. A good "keyword density" is made up of 2%-6%. In other words, a keyword should not make up more than 2%-6% of the content of your site.

4. Doorway pages – users do not see these pages; only search engines do. Most of the time, a few keyword phrases and html code are contained on doorway pages. Doorway pages are meant to boost a site's search engine ranking by fooling a search engine spider into thinking your site is relevant for certain keywords. The drawbacks of doorway pages is being detected by search engines. Not only the search engines will decrease the amount of traffic your site receives, they may even ban your website.

SEO is both a science and an art. Though "black hat" or "grey hat" search engine techniques seems to be appealing, avoiding them can ensure your website a long term natural site traffic. ID: mcpmhk21