No doubt you have heard the noise from some self-appointed marketing
communication experts who promise you “too good to be true” internet
marketing results. They claim they can give you “instant SEO results”
or “SEO results for less.” Be wary–you can’t “just add water” and get
effective SEO. Here’s why.
Keywords and SEO
As you probably know, SEO writing relies on keywords sprinkled
throughout your website content. These keywords are words or phrases
your ideal customer or client enters into search engine windows to find
businesses like yours. If you do not have the keyword posted in your
content somewhere, you will probably not end up in the top search
return positions.
Some rocket scientist out there in cyberspace decided to try keyword
stuffing. He or she started repeating the search term keywords over and
over. For instance, if you sell red widgets, your keyword stuffing
might be an article that looks like this: “Red widgets. Red widgets red
widgets. Red widgets, red. Widgets….” Seems pretty underhanded, doesn’t
it?
That’s why the search engines now consider this unethical practice a
good reason to boot you from the search results if you do this. For
best results, have well written and meaningful articles on your website
with a keyword concentration of not more than 4%. Black hat SEO
techniques will get you banned and blacklisted.
Also be wary of keyword stuffing in metatags. Not only is it risky
in the same way the content keyword stuffing is risky, but search
engines do not even use metatags much anymore for their results. Why
bother with the risk?
Backlinks
While having a good number of backlinks–links posted on other
websites to yours–tells a search engine that your site is relevant and
important, the practice of using link farms can get you banned, too. A
link farm is a collection of websites that all link to each other,
creating automatic link popularity. Another word for this technique is
spamdexing, because link farms spam the search engines’ indexes.
Again, any website owner who sees others do this may be tempted to
do the same, but remember that it is unethical and can get you in
trouble. The search engines have become sophisticated enough to filter
link farm results from your page. They now influence rankings very
little, and when they do it is not positively.
Of course, in the end many people do not get caught doing these
highly unethical forms of influencing their search engine rankings.
Black hat SEO is still employed now and then, but keep in mind that
long term success of these web pages is not very likely. The best ways
to keep above the table with SEO are:
- Have good content with 4% keyword concentration
- Use metatags wisely
- Get relevant backlinks from reputable sites
- Avoid new SEO techniques that may come up in the future if they seem underhanded
Follow these rules and you will avoid the bad reputation that comes with black hat SEO.
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