No matter how competitive your keyword phrases, you need every edge that you can get over your competition. You need to know what can affect your rankings so you can do something about it.
But remember: You don’t need to use tricks or cheats in order to compete in the rankings. Tricks and cheats will get you banned from the search engines — not top rankings. Play it safe, and you’ll come out a winner in the long run.
Don’t spam! So, you need to learn of any “red flags” that might get you labelled as a spammer by the engines. Some of these red flags used to be common practices in the past, so it’s important to cover them in detail here. You certainly don’t want to get in trouble with the engines and get banned from their indexes. Some SEO’s believe (based on their experiences) that getting banned for spamming leads to a life-long penalty even after your site is let back into the index. In other words, your site may be allowed back into the index, but your rankings will always suffer as a result of being banned. Don’t spam — it’s NOT worth it.
How to Stay out of Trouble with the Search Engines
In many cases, you’ll feel like you’re walking a very fine line with the search engines on what could benefit your site’s rankings and what they consider to be spamming. You must be extremely careful.
More and more search engines are cracking down on what they consider spamming techniques used to gain top rankings. Legitimate webmasters must be careful not to get put in the same category as the small minority of spammers who submit millions of pages and present off-topic material in irrelevant categories.
Also, techniques that weren’t considered spamming several months or a year ago are now “red flag” areas that the engines monitor closely.
Don’t spam! Folks, it’s just not worth it. Don’t spam. It’s as simple as that!
Guidelines that will help you avoid trouble with the search engines:
- Never use keywords in your META or other tags that do not pertain to your site’s content. This is a definite red flag area for the engines. Why would you want to do it anyway? If your website is about gardening tools, why would you want to toss in keywords about a different topic just to try to get traffic in through that topic? It won’t work anyway.
- Do not use “doorway page” strategies of the past, and make sure your gateway pages are content-rich information pages. “Information pages” are finely tuned pages that are optimised for one keyword phrase only. While it’s good to create multiple information pages that target different sets of keyword phrases, don’t be excessive. Each page you create must be of value to both the visitors AND to the search engines. And, each page must be two directional — have links going to and from those pages to other pages on your site.
- Don’t submit your site to search engines using free URL’s. It’s best to let the search engines find pages on their own through links rather than submitting the pages.
However, before going this route, what do you have to do? (Let’s think about this for a moment.) You have to make sure that you have given the search engines plenty of ways to FIND those links. Don’t ever give the search engines just ONE way to find links to your pages. Every page on your site is a potential window or entry way into your site for a visitor or a search engine. So, if a search engine enters on one particular page (ANY page), can the search engine find links to all of your other pages through that one page? In other words, is there a link to your site map on that page? Is there a link to your home page on that page? Are there links to the main pages of your site on that page? Make sure that you provide clear navigation to all areas of your site on every page of your site, because you have no way of knowing where a search engine or a visitor is going to enter your site.
- Check your rankings for your important keywords in all of the search engines regularly but don’t overdo it. It’s not important to check your rankings every day or even every week. Once a month is fine, or once every two weeks. USE MODERATION in every thing that you do. If you see any potential problems, handle them immediately.
- Don’t use “machine-generated pages”. In other words, don’t use software that creates dozens of almost identical pages, then simply switches out keywords.
- If you use pages of links, like a site map, make sure to use TEXT to describe the links as well. Offer a sentence or two that describes each link. Using link text that contains your keyword phrase can also boost your relevancy with most engines, so keep that in mind as well.
- Stay away from hidden links, hidden text, hidden frames, hidden layers, or hidden ANYTHING, which are all considered spamming.
- Cloaking – Use with extreme caution! The engines do NOT like cloaking. So, understand that cloaking is spam.
- Don’t participate in link exchange programs or link farms.
- Avoid repeating the same keyword dozens of times in a row on your page or in your META or other tags. Use your keyword phrase ONCE in your keyword-containing tags. Keyword stuffing is the repeated use of a keyword to increase the page’s relevancy.
Here’s an example:
software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software software - Keep in mind that less is usually better.
- Don’t use “tiny text”. Tiny text is repeating your keywords over and over again in a very small font size usually at the bottom of your page.
- Avoid invisible text, which is placing content in a font colour that is the same or similar colour as the background of the page. To view the invisible text, you can highlight the entire web page while viewing it in your browser.
- Avoid using redirect tags, such as a META refresh tag or a Java redirect. A redirect tag is a tag that immediately takes the viewer to another web page. These tags have some legitimate uses, but regretfully, they’ve gotten a bad name.
- Don’t optimise several pages for the same keyword phrase, which causes those pages to dominate the search engine results.
- Don’t use multiple title tags.
- Don’t use duplicate content. Make each web page totally unique and of value to both your visitors and the search engines.
- Use all tags in the manner in which they were designed to be used by the W3C. For example, ALT text was designed to be used to describe graphics for those who surf with the images turned off or for those who are visually challenged and use software to have the web pages read to them. So, be sure to use ALT text to describe images – NOT to stuff keywords in them.
Go through your web pages, and if you’re using ALT text as a place to overuse keywords, remove those keywords immediately. The same thing goes for the keyword META tag and comment tags. - Use moderation in every facet of search engine optimisation.
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