The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #7 “Avoid Black Hat Techniques”

They appear every so often on internet marketing forums; people claiming to have discovered a loophole or fool proof “black hat” search engine optimization technique. Their technique, available for a price, will propel your website to the top of the search engine listings – and of course they guarantee you’ll never get caught.

Now, think about it. While we’d all like to believe that there are methods that can get us to number one in Google with no effort whatsoever, it just isn’t true. Google is huge, and it’s smart. There’s no denying that those employing “black hat” (a phrase used to describe methods that go against Google, or other search engine’s terms of service) techniques may experience success at first, but it won’t be long term. Not ever. In fact, there’ll be lucky if it works for a few days.

Let’s say these people, these forum peddlers, really had discovered a flawless technique to guarantee themselves top of the pile picks in search engine results. Do you think they’d be selling their method for a couple of bucks on forums? No, of course not. If their method really worked, they’d be creating small affiliate websites in every profitable niche, working their SEO black hat magic and sitting back to watch the profits roll in. Furthermore, the more they publicize their method, the more likely it is that Google will discover it – so why would they risk it?

They wouldn’t, because these methods don’t exist. Avoid them. Don’t waste money, both on purchasing the method and the subsequent building and use of method on a website, on something that is doomed to fail.

The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #3 “Duplicate Content”

Among those well versed in internet marketing, duplicate content is something of a sticky issue. The exact nature of the problem is in what constitutes duplicate content, with some internet marketers insisting anything that has previously been written on any other website qualifies as duplicate content – while others say it only matters for the same text to be repeated on the same website.

The exact definition is not exactly known, and isn’t helped by the fact that the search engines are not particularly forthcoming on the issue. However, if you are found to be using duplicate content on your website and a search engine does have an issue with it, you can forget about getting a good ranking with that search engine.

It is more likely – though not certain – that the duplicate content rule applies to text used within the same site. You should not, for example, make lots of pages all using the same article with no changes. This is the lesser version of duplicate content, though some marketers still insist search engines frown on the same article or text being used from anywhere on the internet; and that this will trigger a duplicate content penalty.

The idea, of course, is to avoid plagiarism and for search engines to avoid publishing results that show the same text over and over again. To be absolutely sure you’re not committing the duplicate content sin, always write and use original content, both within your website and externally. That way, you can be sure – no matter who is right or wrong in the debate – that you aren’t going to be penalized for it.

The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #1 “Hidden Text”

Anyone with a basic understanding of search engine optimization will know that text on a website plays a large part in how you are ranked in search engines. In fact, it could be argued that the textual content of a website is actually the most important thing for search engines.

It’s therefore natural for the cunning mind to wonder if it’s possible to introduce sections of ‘hidden text’. Imagine you’re not the best writer in the world, and you don’t want to have to spend a lot of money outsourcing content creation. Yet at the same time, you’re aware of the importance that search engines place on textual content. So rather than writing poor articles yourself, trying to jam your keywords in, you can simply write the keywords into a spare section of your website – and then change the font color so it is the same, or virtually the same, as the background of the page. Suddenly, your website is stuffed with keywords, but all without having to publish poor articles or ruin the look and feel of your website in general.

This practice goes by a variety of names, including font matching and keyword stuffing. However, whatever you call it, it’s a bad idea.

Why? Well, the reason is obvious – it’s a cheat. Google, and the other major search engines, place an importance on text content because they want their search results to be relevant. Hidden text defeats the point of this, and if you’re caught doing it, you will have your website banned from the search engine – for good. So don’t do it.