Search Engine Optimization - What Not to Do
by Rob Sullivan, Production Supervisor Searchengineposition.com
There are many techniques webmasters use to get their sites top rankings in search engines which they call optimization. Once you strip away all the techniques which could get you banned by search engines, and the techniques that have no value to your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, you find that true search engine optimization can be quite difficult.
In brief, what you do need to do is make sure your site is easy to navigate, that it is full of good useful content and ideally that you are adding new content on a regular basis. Call this content spider food. You are creating a way to ensure that the search engine spiders visit on a regular basis.
But there are many things you may have heard about that you could do, and you may wonder if you should do them. These are our recommendations only. If you feel that you could safely perform these techniques without any penalization then feel free to use them.
1. Meta tag stuffing. Many people feel that stuffing keywords in the meta tags helps improve their rankings. The original idea behind meta tags was to give a way to classify the website. The problem now is that many engines don't consider meta tags to be as relevant to the ranking, therefore they give them less weight overall because of the keyword stuffing techniques used. That's not to say that you still shouldn't use meta tags, just consider to use them for what they were originally intended - that is to give your site an accurate title and description with a few keywords (3 or 4 phrases max) outlining what the page, or site is about.
2. Alt tag stuffing. This technique involves using the alt tags in images to hide keywords. Much like meta tag stuffing mentioned above, this technique rarely helps a site position well. As mentioned above, use common sense and use the alt tag to describe what the picture is about. If you can insert a key phrase into the image description then by all means do so. Remember that Alt tags do usually count towards your overall keyword density so it's better to have relevant keyword alt tags than something like "image01.gif".
3. Comment tags. Comment tags are sometimes used to identify sections of a website. They are generally noted by using "<!--" before the comment, and "--ɬ" after. Some people think that putting keywords into comment tags help their SEO efforts. The truth is that many engines ignore the comment tags or assign such a low value to them that they are a waste of time to stuff full of keywords.
4. Multiple meta tags. Some people use many title tags or even entire sets of meta tags to increase keyword density. In most cases the search engines will only look for 1 set of title, description and keywords tags and will ignore the rest.
5. Other meta tags. On the same lines as above, many people use other forms of meta tags and stuff them with keywords. As mentioned above, search engines generally only look for the title, description and keywords tags and nothing else. Therefore these other tags are a waste of time.
6. Using text which is the same color as the background and/or tiny text. Some sites use white text on a white background or really small text on the same color background as a way to stuff keywords to increase keyword density. Not only is this not a proper SEO technique, but you also risk getting banned if the search engines catch on to this spam technique. The general rule is that if the average user can't see the text then it shouldn't be there.
7. Hidden links. By serving up links specifically to search engine spiders that aren't visible to users you risk getting banned. While this was an acceptable technique as recently as earlier this year, we encourage you not to use them. Remember that if a user can't see it then it shouldn't be there.
8. Doorway pages. Still in use today, most search engines frown on this and are working at penalizing sites which use these. Doorway pages are pages built to search engine criteria, that is optimized page size, keyword density and so on, but have no real value to the average search engine user.
Remember, these are only our guidelines. We don't use any of these techniques because we feel these border on search engine spam and by using these you could risk being banned. We prefer to improve the existing content whenever possible by simply rearranging some key phrases within the text, or selectively adding content when possible.
Other techniques like cloaking, where one site is served to users and another is served to search engine spiders, are techniques that will definitely get you banned.
These are only a few of the tricks used to try and improve search engine rankings. I can't emphasize how important it is to use legitimate positioning techniques. As search engines get more sophisticated, more sites utilizing these techniques will start dropping from the indexes, if they already haven't. If your business relies on search engine rankings to make sales, by all means revisit your SEO techniques to make sure everything you are doing is legitimate. By cleaning up HTML coding, removing excess coding and optimizing existing content you can achieve the same or better results then trying to use any of the above techniques.
Article courtesy of Searchengineposition Inc., www.searchengineposition.com.
24.04.2007. 23:17
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