How Not To Optimise Your Website
By Tony Hill
Although many internet users trust search engines to deliver useful results that match their search criteria, search engines are not infallible. Many internet users would have encountered websites that actively deploy ”black hat” SEO techniques and these websites are usually of poor quality and little relevance to the searcher.
Unethical SEO is what is often known in the industry as ”black hat” and there are various ways in which unethical businesses and agencies achieve high rankings through disreputable methods. When appointing an agency to conduct your online marketing activities, or if you decide to complete SEO in house, ensure you are not applying black hat techniques; the consequences can be damage your business and online reputation.
Many online business owners are unclear about what is actually considered as ”black hat” SEO. To clarify, all of the following are unethical methods of optimising your website. Many of these techniques are punishable by expulsion from the search results and should therefore be avoided at all times.
- Keyword Stuffing -
Keyword stuffing is the practice of overusing a word to increase the keyword frequency within the webpage. However, most modern search engines can now detect keyword density. When the keyword density is above normal levels, there may be consequences for your online business. The most significant impact would be to have your website removed from the search engine listings.
- Hidden or Invisible Links -
Essentially a hidden link is a link that is intended to be crawled by the search engine, but is not readable to human users because the links consists of hidden text, the CSS has been used to make small hyperlinks (as small as one pixel high) or the link is hidden in a small character (such as a full stop of hyphen). If your site is perceived to contain hidden links that are deceptive in intent, the site faces removal from the search engine index.
- Hidden Text -
Featuring text (usually keywords) where visitors cannot see them to increase a page’’s keyword relevancy is another unethical technique that many webmasters use. This is commonly carried out by making the text and the background the same colour so human users cannot read the text yet search engines crawl the content, for example; white words on a white background.
- Link Spamming -
Many search engines consider the PageRank through link analysis; the more high quality links that point to your site, the greater importance the search engine will attribute to your site for the given keyword. Some webmasters create multiple websites at different domain names that all link together. Again, this is a black hat technique that should not be implemented as part of your search marketing strategy.
When implementing your search marketing strategy, ensure you - or your search marketing agency - does not employ black hat SEO techniques; the consequences for doing so can deeply damage your online reputation and seriously impact your business. Many consumers drive their purchases from search engines - being expelled from the search listings can consequently cease your business operation.
About The Author
web design agency and SEO kent are currently being researched by Tony, an online marketer
