5 Mistakes SEO’s Make

1.) Keyword Spamming and Spamdexing

This tactic consists of repeating the keyword a ridiculous amount of times on a page. I see this a lot at the bottom of pages in very small font. SEO’s will write something like we proudly offer: cheap stuff, the cheap stuff, cheap stuff today, free cheap stuff, cheap stuff unlimited, etc. First off, Google isn’t stupid. Not only does Google look at the keyword(s) you are targeting but they look at co citation of words that belong with those keywords. For example, if you were talking about Dogs you might also hear things like collar, german shepard, kennel, paws, and other things of that nature that would come up normally in a talk about dogs. Secondly, what kind of user experience is it really when someone litters their content with keywords every single sentence. Just write naturally. Do some keyword research to find the topic and you will be fine.

2.) Invisible and Semi-Visible Text

This one is pretty crazy. I have seen people do this time and again and not get into any trouble. THEN someone reports then, they get caught and down into the abyss they go. Stay away from trying to “beat” the search engines. After all, it is the only reason you are doing it. It doesn’t help a user. Sure your key word density may be perfect with a little extra text, but don’t hide it. Design the page to fit the extra text if you need it.

Bonus NO-NO: Use of the Comment Tag in HTML or CSS. Some people throw keywords into their HTML/CSS comments. HAH! That hasn’t worked since 1996. Good luck.

3.) Redirect Pages

This is a fine line thing. First off, I am not talking about a 301 redirect. I am talking about redirecting a page for whatever reason, IP, User Agent, whatever!. Cloaking is a solid black hat technique and a lot of the good cloaking techniques will use redirect pages. What will happen is that when a user comes to the page, the script will gather some information- usually user agent and IP then if that information matches a bot it will let them crawl the perfectly optimized page about sports or something. If a person comes to the site, they will get redirected to a -fill in the blank- type site; porn, gambling, whatever they can make money on. Google says NO to cloaking and that’s one of the reasons they really hate redirect pages. A lot of the time they will also use ‘timed redirect pages’ so after X amount of time the page will redirect.

NOTE: Google is kind of a hypocrite in the sense that their homepage uses IP delivery. If you go to Google while in Panama, you get redirect to Google.pa, go to them in Russia you will get Google.ru. They preach to not do it, then they do it themselves. I understand why though. They genuinely care about user experience while most others do not and will abuse it with black hat techniques.

Example:

In the head something like:

In the body:
Prepare to be redirected!

4.) One Pixel Images

So what can a 1×1 pixel image do for a site? Well, increasingly and with evidence to suggest, the alt tag is still a useful ranking factor. Some people will abuse this and put a couple 1×1 pixel images and then stuff the alt tags with keywords. The alt tag or alternative text tag is meant for people with disabilities who have screen readers or used when an image does not load. Don’t abuse it and make the user expierence poor. Once again, focus on users and your site will be fine.

Example:

5.) Use of CSS to Conceal Text and Links on the Page

This is pretty common. Beginner SEO’s will use CSS (cascading style sheets) to hide text or links on a page. There are a couple scenarios where this can help someone. With links, it is usually because the seo put a link on a clients site or someones site and doesn’t want them to know. You can also see this when webmasters make long pages with the sole purposes of getting all their content indexed more often. There are better ways to get your content indexed, like:

• Keep your sitemap updated
• Produce fresh content
• Promote your content using social media
• Get natual and manual links

Do that and I assure you the bots will keep comming back. Using CSS to conceal text reverts back to keyword spamming. A webmaster will hide a whole block of perfectly optimized text to the left or display none but the bots will read the text as if it were there.

Examples:

{ display:none; }

or

position: absolute;    top: -1000em;    left: -1000em;

OK, so that about wraps it up. I will come up with some more no-no’s in the future. Until then, stay tuned and don’t fotget if your site isn’t living up to what it should be- REQUEST A FREE QUOTE TODAY!