Seo Latest Tips
The Latest SEO Tips with Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz
Knowing Which SEO Tactics to Keep Clear Of
Optimizing a site the right way takes time, and some people would prefer to see instant results. Therefore, just like other business procedure, search engine optimization lends itself to the challenges at getting around the policies, and best practices of “white hat” search engine optimization. There are many individuals and companies on the web promising that their strategies will catapult your site to the top of search engine results.
The problem with the “black-hat” or “grey hat” strategies these companies use is that their success is short-lived. In the end, major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing will detect “black hat” search engine optimization techniques and they will ban or penalize the websites that use the techniques.
Following is a list of common grey hat and black hat search engine strategies that are best to avoid if you want to acquire long-term quality search engine traffic:
1. Participating in a link farm – link farms consists of pages featuring nothing but links. Artificially creating inbound links boosts the reputation of a site. Thus, this idea was created because search engines will definitely favor sites that have lots of links to them. In the short term, link farms usually are doing well at increasing a website’s pagerank which is Google’s metric at gauging a website’s relevance. However, once the search engines determine that your site is linked to a link farm, they will frequently reduce its page-rank to 0. Since link farms often cost $40-$300/month, you will have lost valuable advertising dollars, if nothing else.
2. Buying links of any kind – purchasing a link from a well-known website is considered less egregious as taking part in link farming. For example, paying a site to link to your website. However, search engines are attracted the links that are 100% natural. Basically, they want links that are made or initiated by people who simply liked your site. Thus, purchased links is an expensive and unproductive way of optimizing your website’s reputation.
3. Repeating keywords – “keyword stuffing” or duplicating keywords multiple times. Websites that uses keywords repeatedly are used to be favored by search engines. For instance, a site about meditation that used the words “guided meditation” 45 times would rank higher than sites that only used the phrase “guided meditation” 4 times. Search engines will eventually decrease the relevance of websites that use keywords in a repetitive manner. However, this does not stop unethical or uninformed people, claiming to be search engine experts, from encouraging others to overuse keywords. A good “keyword density” is generally considered 2%-6%. Meaning, the content of your website should not make up of keywords ranging from 2%-6%.
4. Doorway pages – users do not see these pages; only search engines do. Most of the time, a few keyword phrases and html code are contained on doorway pages. Fooling a search engine spider into accepting your website relevant for certain keywords is the ultimate purpose of doorway pages. As a result, it will boost a website’s ranking. However, if the search engines detect a doorway page, they may decrease the amount of traffic you receive or even ban your site.
SEO is truly an art as well as a science. However, avoiding “black-hat” or “grey-hat” search engine strategies, no matter how appealing they may appear be in the short-term, is the best way to ensure your site gets good organic/natural traffic over the long haul. Document: mcpmhk21