SEO is the way in which you get your website up and running in the search engines. While there are a great many techniques which are successful there are a great many that do not work and may even cause your page to be penalized in the rankings. Typically, these are called Black Hat SEO techniques because they will get you marked as one of the bad guys (blacklisted, black hat, you get the picture). Understanding the techniques to avoid at all costs will definitively help your SEO.

Don’t use unrelated keywords

Keep your keywords appropriate for your website. Adding keywords just to get a few extra hits on the search engine is a big do not do. For one, the content of your site does not have any reference to that key word and so search engine algorithms will just see the word as being irrelevant or spamdexing. Secondly, if someone searches the unrelated term and ends up on your page just to find that it has nothing to do with the content of your page, they will more than likely post a bad comment somewhere on the internet concerning you page. This of course goes against your SEO.

Keep your keywords relevant to your site.

Cloaking

If you want your site to get the big red malware page of death, then use cloaking. What is cloaking? Cloaking is when you present information to the search engines to give it the appearance of being one thing and then present your users with a webpage that has substantially different content. For example: If you have a search engines for “doe tracker” and make it sound like the person will be led to a deer hunting site but when they click on it they are presented with a pornography site, that is cloaking. However, you do not have to have a porn site to get marked as cloaking. If you are presenting a site that is for “Understanding green technology” and you then present them with an ecommerce site that has nothing to do with going green you could be marked as well.

Do not add too many Ads

Google has made the top pages to be those with high quality content. These are sites that help the user to get a task completed through the content of the site, not through an ad. If your page is “overly optimized” with ads Google may not see your page as having anything of value or the Search Engine may label you as being a MFA page.

Truthfully, if your site has a ton of Ads then you are a made for Adsense website. Where there is nothing wrong with having a site that caters to advertisement and sales, do not expect to be the top ranking website (unless of course you are wanting to rank top in the advertisement section).

Do you want linking with that?

Poor SEO ‘professionals’ may offer you the option of building your backlinks quickly. This should be a red flag. Backlinks take a bit of time and need to be developed from multiple sources. Google tracks the IPs, geographic, and sites of links and then compares it with other similar sites, your posting history, your link history, and a ton of other things. The bottom line is that if you hire someone to get you likes, comments, and links quickly for your site, you are shooting yourself in the foot. True, you may go to the top of the Google page for a short time, but once the system finds out that you used ‘internet steroids’ to get to the top, you will be blacklisted.

Duplicate content

Your site has to be original. If your content is primarily copying something that is already available, google will just see it as being so. Websites which have a great deal of the “useful” content as being that from another site or just rewording a top ranked site should not expect to do well in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Additionally, duplicating content from a top SEO site (or any site for that matter) can quickly get you banned from appearing in search engines at all or at minimum push you way back in the search pages.

Work hard and get results

The best way to ensure that you get top SEO quality websites is to work hard at it. There are no magic wands to wave to get you to the top. Sure, there are a few techniques which will help you on your way, but any good SEO professional will tell you that results take time, effort, and uniqueness. Avoid trying to jump on the bandwagon of mass marketed quick SEO fixes, your site has everything to lose if you do.