Search Engine Optimization, (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing, (SEM), are becoming more and more important for the overall success of a company. Big and small businesses are quickly adopting SEO into their marketing plan in hopes of achieving top rankings.
Not all SEO companies are created equal. While reputable companies use ethical SEO practices, there are others who will try to trick search engines into high rankings. These questionable techniques may work for a minute but will eventually fail and may even harm your site in the long run. These black hat techniques are known as spam and can get your site penalized or banned from the search engines.
If an SEO provider promises quick or first-page rankings they are likely using spam techniques. To avoid falling into this trap, you must be aware of unethical SEO techniques and guard yourself against the companies who use them.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword density is the ratio of a keyword or keyphrase to the total words on a page. To improve search engine ranking, your keyword density must not be too high or too low. Try to aim for a keyword density of 1% to 7% or no more than six or seven times within 200 words of text on one page. Keyword density beyond 7% can be considered keyword stuffing. To determine your keyword density you can use a keyword density analyzer.
Hidden Text or Links
This practice involves inserting hidden text or links that are readable by search engine spiders but cannot be seen by human visitors. This can be done by using the same color font as the background, thus making the words invisible. All search engines consider hidden links or hidden text to be spam and will penalize the page, if not the entire site, for it.
Cloaking
Cloaking is the practice of showing a search engine content that's different from what a human would see. Although there are some rare cases where this can be used appropriately, cloaking is typically used to deceive the search engines and is considered a spam technique.
Doorway Pages
Also known as Gateway or Bridge pages, these are low-quality web pages that exist only to pass visitors to a main web site without providing value of their own. Doorway pages are used to achieve high rankings for a particular key phrase while leading the user to a different page that is irrelevant to their search query.
Mirror Sites
This involves the creation of several sites with identical content and placing them on multiple servers with different domain names. These sites link to one another and are constructed for the purpose of achieving multiple rankings for identical keywords using the same content. Search engines suppress duplicate content because it holds no value for their users.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is multiple versions of the same content that exist on different pages. Search engines are not always able to distinguish the originating source of content, so multiple copies could detract from the original source's rankings.
Link Farms
Pages that consists of little else but links to other sites and usually the sites listed have links back to the farm page. The goal of a link farm is to artificially boost rankings through link popularity and is consequently at risk of penalty or ban. Quality backlinks are good but links farms do not produce quality links.
These are some of the common spam techniques to avoid but there are many more to be leery of. Typically if it seems unethical it probably is. Brand Identity can assist you if you are looking for a reputable SEO company.
