You will probably read a lot about how to do your SEO, but how do you know what to avoid. You might get offered opportunities that look really great but in reality will harm your search engines rankings. The aim of this article is to make sure you don't make the mistakes many people have in the past.



Basically SEO is the process of getting your website to the top of the search engines by implementing a number of techniques that will let the search engines know what you are all about. However some techniques that are implemented are frowned upon by the search engines and could result in your site being penalised or even banned from a search engine. Below is out list of the top 6 things to run a mile from:

1. Hidden Text

One technique used by bad SEOs is the process of adding extra text to your website that is the same colour as the background. This means that someone visiting your website won't be able to read it but the search engines will. Often you will find that this hidden text is just a list of keywords and the aim is to get it in more times without affecting user experience.

Once upon a time this technique would have been a great help to you and your ranking would have risen quickly. Now search engines like Google can detect that this is hidden text and will not including it in your ranking. In fact one of our clients is looking for a new domain name as they have been banned from Google for using this technique. So try this and don't expect to last long.

2. Title Stacking

This is the process of adding more than one title tag to your web page in order to get more keywords into your title. This will very quickly be picked up by the search engines for spamming and will see you with a ban before you know it. Stick to one title tag and include your main keywords.

3. Duplicate Content

One of the factors that search engines use to rank you is the number of pages on your website. So you may be tempted to replicate the same page several times or to even copy content from another website. This may seem like a good idea but in reality it has no benefits. Search engines are very good at picking up duplicate content and will simply disregard any page that is a copy of another. So although you may not get a penalty you will get no benefit out of producing duplicate content. However if you are copying someone else's content you could always end up with a law suit.

4. Link Exchanges or Farms

There are some companies out there that will pull you in with a linking system in order to increase your back links. This will involve you linking to a website and getting a link back. These can sometimes go a couple of layers deep so that you link to site 2, site 2 links to site 3 and site 3 links to you. The aim is to boost your links and so ranking quickly. The problem with this is that search engines can detect them. From information given by Google, they will not give you a penalty for this type of linking but they will simple disregard any links from link farms and so they will be a waste of your time and money.

5. Cloaking

This is the process of showing one website to people searching the internet and another one to the search engines. Then the version you show to the search engines can be highly optimised while the one that goes to the public is on something completely different. As this was a technique used by sites involved in the adult industry it needed to be stopped and the search engines can detect this and will ban you immediately. It is not worth trying.

6. Doorway Pages

This is the process of creating a web page on a topic and optimising it to get to the top and then it will lead to a page about something completely different. These techniques often incorporate the use of cloaking or redirects as well. Again this can be detected by search engines and will get you a ban very quickly.

Conclusion

If you think a technique that is being suggested to you sounds like a quick fix to get you to the top it is probably a bad idea. There are no quick fixes in SEO it is hard work and needs a consistent effort to obtain and maintain search engine rankings. Don't be fooled by the quick results you are being offered.