Search engines are the supreme powers when it comes to online marketing. Keep them satisfied with your web site so that your web site has a chance of going up the ranking ladder. While shady schemes can fool the search engines temporarily, the consequences could be disastrous in the long run. Now search engines themselves want to stay popular with the people. So they want to have the best collection of sites for every keyword. This also means that they try to keep spam out! If you used loopholes to get around the search engine algorithms, it will work for a while, until your web site is discovered as spammy.
SEO Techniques
Most web sites use two basic SEO techniques white hat and black hat. While black hat techniques focus on getting away with as much as they can, it is the white hat techniques that give you long term results. White hat techniques concentrate on enhancing the quality of the web site so that it attracts more visitors. But black hat techniques are aimed at getting maximum visibility by hook or crook. Here are some tactics you might do well to stay away from.
Doorway linking
Many web sites give out results for popular keywords and phrases. Search engines list them. But when the users click on the links, they are transported to some other page which has no connection to the keyword. These are called gateway pages or bridge pages and use Javascript or Meta refresh tactics for redirection.
Keyword loading
Some other web sites fill up their pages with all the popular keywords, regardless of whether they are relevant or not. Hidden words and phrases ensure that the website shows up on search engines, even when the site does not have anything related to that keyword. These are tactics to ensure visibility.
Spamdexing
This involves repeated submissions, spam content and deceptive links. Different descriptions with hot keywords are used to point to the same site.
Cloaking
Web sites first check whether it is a visitor or search engine crawler and then show different content. While search engines are given a few lines of relevant content, a visitor is directed to several versions having all the unnecessary content, meant for advertising and so on.
Ultimately, a well-designed user-friendly web site with rich and well-organized content will move up the rankings and stay at the top for a longer time than with any other method.
