Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Things to Avoid in Search Engine Optimization - Black Hat Methods



A few search marketers use unfair methods or Black-Hat methods to get to the top of the search engine rankings. However Black hat Techniques are sure to make you act in haste and repent in leisure



In this article I will be highlighting a few techniques to Optimize your website ethically without using Unfair or Black Hat Optimization Techniques to get good rankings in the organic search engines.

So what exactly is Black Hat SEO ?

Black Hat SEO refers to all those optimization activities that violate the basic search engine guidelines. Black hat methods are adapted to manipulate the Search Engine Result Pages and get to the top of the search engines as soon as possible and with minimal efforts.

If Black Hat gets result, then what's the harm ?

It's true that some black hat methods will get you desired results. The only problem with adapting black hat methods is that the results are temporary and causes major damage to the web site. There is something known as the New Site Boost which every new website gets in the search engine result pages. If black hat methods are applied to such new sites, they may come up pretty well in the search engines and may out pass major players. But that's only temporary, that site will soon start falling in the Search Engine Result Pages and gradually vanish from the search engines.

Once search engines figure out that a site has adapted black hat methods to manipulate the rankings, they will not only penalize the site but might also ban them from the search engines result pages, which means that you will no longer be seen in the search engines even if you search with your domain name.

What are black hat methods?

The following is the list of some commonly used black hat methods:

Keyword stuffing - This is one of the most commonly used black hat methods practiced by black hat SEOs to get faster results. Keyword stuffing refers to redundancy of targeted keywords in the page title, description, body, images etc. This is a serious violation of search engine rules and may result in penalization of your site from the index.

Cloaking - Cloaking refers to pointing one page to the search engine spiders and another version of the same page to the web site visitors. This is done so as to get the spiders to the optimized page while the visitors get to see a different page. Cloaking is another black hat method which will surely ban your site from the search engines. In fact, this is the only reason why major car manufacturer BMW got their German site banned from Google recently.

Hidden Text - Hidden text is a way of plugging in additional text so as to increase the keyword density of a page. Texts are hidden by using a font color that matches the one used in the page background. Hidden texts are hard to be seen by humans but it's a mere child's play for search engines to find them out.

Using Redirection - Many webmasters optimize a page for the search engines and then redirect those pages to some other destination using a META REFRESH tag which redirects a visitor to a new destination after a fixed period of time. This is considered as spam by the search engines and may lead to serious penalties or even permanent ban.

Another way of redirection which, if kept for a long time might raise some red flags in the search engines is the 302 temporary redirect. This is a redirection which is made at the server level of web sites and such redirection are meant to redirect visitors to a new page on a temporary basis. But if such a redirection lasts more for than 6 months, it raises some red flags in the search engines and thus the site gets penalized or banned by the search engines.

Another redirection which will surely get your site in a soup is the one using Java Script redirection. Such a redirection is made using Java Scripts and is a serious violation of search engine guidelines.

Take care not to use any of the above methods to optimize a website. Using any of the above means to optimize your website may result in your website being banned in Google and many other Search Engines. Use fair methods of optimizing your site by following proven Search Engine guidelines Remember you are making a site for a human not a robot.



Michael Ringwood is an avid internet marketer and an expert on a variety of online marketing Techniques, search engine optimization , social media and web2.0 marketing. He has worked for several start up internet Companies and currently does consulting work for several top digital media online properties including 123greetings.com.

He also writes on Holidays and Events round the World




Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Ringwood






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