With over 50,000* brilliant minds behind the scenes, chances are Google is smarter than the average Internet user. A huge percentage of website traffic is generated by search engines, so it is vital to businesses to appeal to potential customers by ranking highly within results pages. Changes and updates within search engines’ algorithms keep optimization specialists seeking new and better ways to achieve higher rankings using White Hat SEO tactics.
White Hat SEO focuses on relevancy of the topic to the user and not just ranking highly within a search engine. Most optimization specialists genuinely want a user to find the website informative and helpful as well as profitable for the client. At the other end of SEO’s monochromatic spectrum, there are Black Hat SEO tactics. Black Hat SEO is punished by search engines due to the unethical manner in which it is implemented. These tactics focus solely on ranking and care little about site usefulness.
If maintaining long-term high rankings within search engines and gaining hoards of potential customers is just not your cup of tea, here are lots of ways to ruin your online presence!
KEYWORD STUFFING
Arriving to a website with the same sentence repeated over and over down the screen is neither helpful or attractive to anyone. The process of keyword stuffing is highly frowned upon by search engines and will result in punishment from the man – aka the powerful, almighty search engine in which cannot be fooled.
Placing copy throughout a landing page with text written in the same color as the background is one way untrained SEO professionals try to improve site rankings. If the goal is to irritate search engine crawlers and get a website banned, stuffing keywords into “invisible text” is one avenue that is sure to get results.
CLOAKING
This Black Hat technique refers to when a site submits content or a sitemap to a search engine that is entirely different than what website visitors see. Usually this tactic is used to promote an inappropriate or illegal site. Nobody likes to be fooled, but if you try to trick Google go ahead and say “bye bye” to your website.
DUPLICATE CONTENT
Sometimes the result of pure laziness, duplicate content within a site (or sites) is another way to decrease rankings. Often, this mishap occurs to businesses as many websites have multiple ways to arrive to the same content or multiple websites that use some of the same content.
This causes an issue with search engines because time is money. They only want to rank content one time and give that page its proper page rank. When more than one page have the same content, it decreases its ranking because the search engine’s time has been wasted crawling it again.
It’s important to be on the good side of search engines. True optimization professionals can sniff out Black Hat practices like an Internet bloodhound. Many are available and ready to work with you to improve your website ethically. And as luck would have it, Webspec Design has got a few available to help with all client SEO needs.
*http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html
