SEO No Nos

Introduction

There are numerous ways of performing Search Engine Optimisation. There are plenty of good techniques, or "White Hat SEO", there are also plenty of bad techniques ot "Black Hat SEO". Black Hat SEO is not a long term strategy for any web site looking to stick around for more than 1 year. Today's Search Engines have developed sophisticated ways of discovering Black Hat techniques used on web sites artificially or "illegally" enhancing their search results. When these search engine spamming techniques are found by the major search engines, the offending site could well be banned entirely from their index.

We'll cover a few below.

Invisible Links and Text

Using CSS to match the background colour of a page and some of the text or links on it. The visitor won't necessarily see it but the keywords and links ratio get boosted "illegally." If you think a site might be doing this, highlight the whole page with your cursor and mouse. See any text that doesn't show otherwise? Thet's invisible text and that will get penalized.

Title Tag

The Title should be kept below 80 characters, any longer triggers filters that could be applied by the various indexes that monitor this useful seo tool.

Alt Text

Stuffing the image alt text tags full of keywords may have worked a long time ago but not anymore. The value of the keywords in the alt text tags has been significantly diminished by the major engines. Just use descriptive words about the picture, don't waste your time or get banned for that.

Filenames and Folders

Filenames and folders are great tools but don't overdo it. Limit yourself to 2 subfolders and filenames that are descriptive but not whole paragraphs full of keywords.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a technique where, using the server, the owner can determine what type of user is visiting a site. A user in this case will be a user-agent. A user-agent can be a normal person, a spider or robot. Once the type of user agent has been determined, the site owner serves a page. Cloaking presents different pages to different user agents. So, for black hat seo's purposes, a keyword stuffed, search engine specific optimised page will be served to the spider/robot. The page will be optimised for one topic, boosting it's search results, but when a real user visits the site, the page could be entirely different.

Floating Elements

We'll define these Floating Elements like this:

Picking a spot on a web site, packing it full of keywords and links and then hiding it behind an iframe. The user won't see it, but the search engine spiders will. Boost your results this way and you'll get nailed.

Links

Exchange links by all means but don't exchange with sites completely irrelevant to yours, to bad neighborhoods and to any site that requests a link. That's just not good practice.

The anchor text inyour links should also be varied so that not all links use the same anchor text.

Comments

Don't use unnecessary comments in your code stuffed full of keywords. Users don't see it but search engines do.

Conclusion

Optimise your site effectively and cleanly using White Hat SEO, you'll be around a lot longer, your users will appreciate it and you won't be worried about getting kicked out at any moment.