It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you can 'fool' or 'trick' the search engines. Webmasters and designers have tried to fool Google since it's inception, and before that, Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek (r.i.p.) and Alta Vista. Can it be done? Yes.
Will it help in the short term? Possibly.
Could it cause you unfixable problems in the future? MOST DEFINITELY!
So here are a few things you SHOULDN'T be doing if you want to get higher search engine positions:
1) Invisible keywords - white text on a white background, black text on a black background - just don't do it! Google doesn't like it, it's classed as spamming, and will get you into trouble. The same goes for tiny font - if you're trying to trick a search engine, you already know what you're doing is wrong, now don't you?
2) Keyword stuffing - using alt tags and comment tags to stuff the code of your site with keywords. Not a good idea. Some search engines ignore comment tags anyway, so it won't work, but others don't and it could get you banned.
3) Double up on tags. An example of this is having two title tags in your code, in order to increase the amount of space for keywords or phrases. The same goes for two META keyword tags, or description tags. Are you doing it for any reason other than to fool the search engines? No? Then don't do it at all!
4) Don't 'cloak' - this is the practice of showing a search engine one page, but a visitor sees another, and was very popular about 6 years ago. It did work, now it gets penalised - don't do it!
5) Don't 'redirect' - the page that the search engine sees should be the one that you optimise. Redirects (where an initial page is highly optimised but may not look great, so after 1 second redirects a visitor to a prettier page) can also get you banned. Not worth the small advantage it may give you.
6) Too many outbound links. Do you really need 100+ links going out of your site? Of course not, and Google knows that this is usually an example of using a 'link farm' - another way of spamming. Stick to no more than 20 or so links leaving your site if you don't want to be penalised.
7) Unrelated keywords - if your site is about Public Relations in Aylesbury, stuffing it with keywords that are completely unrelated won't just do you no good, it could harm your listings in a number of search engines. I know that a million people a minute search for 'Britney Spears', but that doesn't mean that by including it in your META tags or within your site, you'll bring them to your site. Trust me on this one, it's not happening!
So there you go - a few tips on things that you shouldn't be doing. If you have been doing some of the above, and you're worried that your site may have been penalised for it , drop me a line at nikki@nikkipilkington.com and I'll be happy to have a look for you and let you know honestly whether it's had an effect.
Nikki Pilkington is owner of Milton Keynes based Internet Marketing Company Nikki Pilkington .com, and writes articles, hints and tips to help people looking to promote their website for free, as well as running paid e-marketing campaigns. For more of her articles visit www.nikkipilkington.com and sign up to the newsletter.
© Nikki Pilkington Please do not reproduce without either a link or permission
