There's no greater competition on the Internet than the fight to get to the top of the search engines. An entire industry has sprung up around search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Some companies make outrageous, tempting, but too-good-to-be-true promises about getting you to the top of Google, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Like any other business, SEO has its real gems and its terrible scams. Before you search for an SEO company for your site, here are a few SEO "tricks" that could get your site penalized, or worse, blacklisted for good.
1) Keyword stuffing is not the path to success.
Search engines are always looking for keywords, so the more you have on the page, the better, right? If you just repeat two or three keyword phrases 50 times on your home page, surely you'll rank higher than everybody else!
Well, no. Keyword stuffing is a big no-no in the world of SEO. It doesn't matter if you color the keywords the same as the background or put them into meta tags (both methods discussed below). Shoving keywords on your site – especially irrelevant keywords – merely for the sake of rankings will get you into big trouble with the search engines.
The recommended keyword density for sites is about 4 percent to 8 percent. So, if you've got 500 words on your home page, at the most only 40 of those should be keywords.
Search engine optimization is the art of strategically placing keywords in your content without making it look like you're putting plenty of keywords in your content. You want search engines to see what your site is all about, but you don't want to detract from the user experience. Keyword stuffing does exactly that, and will hurt you in the long run.
2) Hide your passwords, not your keywords.
Some websites hide keywords or links by making the text the same color as the background, or through other coding means (meta tags or putting text behind images, for two examples). The logic here is that users can't see them, so it doesn't detract from the user experience, but the search engines will read them, so it still boosts your rankings.
This is not the case. Search engines will actually penalize or even ban your site if you have text that is the same color as the background on your website. It's just another way of trying to "beat the system," and search engines don't like that.
3) Meta-tags are so 1990s.
A brief history of meta tags: Long, long ago in 1996, when there was no Google and search engines were not nearly as sophisticated as they are today, meta tags were a handy indicator that told search engines what your page was about. The meta description tag and meta keywords tag were only visible to the search engine spiders, not by somebody viewing your page through a browser.
For example, if you had a page about Acme widgets, then your description might have said "Everything you ever wanted to know about Acme widgets." Your meta keywords might have included "Acme widgets," "history of Acme widgets," and "building Acme widgets."
However, people got greedy and started stuffing the meta tags with keywords, repeating phrases like "building Acme widgets" over and over in an effort to boost their search engine rankings. Search engines now use more sophisticated algorithms and meta tags are all but extinct.
If anybody tries to tell you that meta keyword tags are a magical solution that will shoot you to the top of the rankings, they either don't know what they're talking about, or they're trying to scam you. Leave behind the era of spinning gifs and blinking text and bring your website into the 21st century.
4) Avoid duplicate pages and duplicate content at all costs.
We had a marketing client recently who had three websites with identical home pages with identical title tags and identical content. Guess what Google did to his site? If you picked "flagged him for a duplicate content penalty and quit listing the site in search results," you would be correct.
Duplicate pages and duplicate content negatively affect your search engine rankings, and also detract from the user experience. If you visited a site and saw the same article on three pages, even if the major keywords were changed ("constructing Acme widgets" instead of "building Acme widgets"), wouldn't you feel cheated?
Unique and useful content on all of your pages will make both search engines and your visitors happy.
5) Don't harvest from link farms.
It's not just keywords that are considered with search engine rankings. Incoming links are also important. If other sites think yours is worth linking to, then search engines will give it more weight as well.
Link farms horribly twist this concept to be about the quantity of links rather than the quality. Link farms are groups of sites that all link to one another, regardless of how relevant those links are, in an effort to boost traffic and rankings.
Link farms can grow to encompass hundreds of thousands of links, but they're shallow, meaningless, and unprofessional, and search engines HATE them. When it comes to links, link to sites that are relevant to your users, and see if those sites will link to you. A hundred relevant inbound links will help you much more than 10,000 from a link farm.
Remember the user experience
Search engines are here to serve the users and deliver them good content that's relevant to what they're looking for. Search engine optimization is simply doing your best to ensure that your quality content is catching users' eyes and search engines' spiders. Keyword stuffing, hidden links and keywords, meta tags, link farms and duplicate content will drive both users and spiders away.
A good SEO company will know this, and they won't promise you some "magical" solution that will shoot you to the top of the rankings in three hours. They'll give you good, keyword-rich content that will work together with your website to increase your rankings organically. Where bad SEO will get your site banned and blacklisted, good SEO will make your website better than you ever thought possible.