A number of tricks emerged during those good old days, which search engines are now savvy to but some web masters still use. These days, stuffing links and keywords is a good way to get yourself knocked out of the top spots. Particularly if you attempt to load invisible keywords for the search engine crawlers only, today's more sophisticated algorithms will catch the trick and potentially downgrade your ranking. Search engine crawlers still look at keywords, but this is generally to ensure that the content on the site matches the keywords submitted to the search engine.



Before adding new features or content to your site, consider going back through your legacy code to remove any of the following that might be holding you back:

- Irrelevant keywords in META tags, visible tags, or titles

- Invisible keywords targeted at search crawlers

- Links from or to exchanges or link farms

- Links from or to spammy sites

- Ridiculous density of keywords in your site content

- Anything that was intended to increase page rankings at the expense of user experience

- Attributes that smack of spam

- Gateway pages whose only purpose is to re-direct to the actual content

Keeping your keywords short and relevant is good a practice. A good technique for determining the relevance of your keywords is to look into what users are searching for, such as on Google Trends. If your site targets a unique niche, you may want to add in a few – just a few! - related keywords that are more commonly searched for. Check the source information on your competitors' websites, particularly those who have achieved high rankings in the search engines you're interested in.

Likewise, your links should be relevant and of high quality. This may mean that you need to check the content and hidden content of the sites you've linked to, in order to ensure that you're not associated with spam-like or poorly optimized sites, or with link farms or exchanges. Solicit links from other professionals in your field or those sites who deal with related information. In all cases the purpose of the linking should be to provide value to your users first, and to increase your rankings second.

Search engines reward quality, usability, and relevance to the user community. You should always keep this mantra in mind when adding information targeted at web crawlers, or when streamlining and updating your site. Search engine sites are web sites themselves, and they must provide unique and valuable services to their users. That means finding the most relevant and useful content, not simply the highest density of related technical data such as links and keywords, and they tweak their algorithms accordingly.

Keep good keyword and link hygiene. Search engines and users will reward your diligence.