If you’ve gone to an SEO professional and they have recommended some of the techniques below, fire them. Seriously. If you’ve ever thought about using some of these ideas as a short-cut to high rankings, here’s something to consider; you will get banned from search engines for doing so. Read our article to make sure you stay ahead of the curve, without resorting to evil, evil deeds.

1. Don’t use gateway pages

Gateway pages are optimised for a particular keyword, but are intended to lead you to a different page with a different keyword. As an example, having several doorway pages optimised for, “Elm”, “Oak” and “Birch” which then redirect a visitor to a website about forest holiday homes. These should be avoided as they often have little original content (something Google ranks highly) and redirect users are from the original website (something oogle ranks poorly).

2. Don’t duplicate Content

Sometimes called, “scraping”. Spam sites often duplicate other RSS feeds from popular websites and display them on one website. You must not infringe copyright by copying content from elsewhere; duplicating too much content can lead to a ban or a serious ranking penalty. If you come across a website that is duplicating your own content, you can tell Google and you won’t suffer at the hands of the spammers.
In addition, try not to copy and paste text between your own pages. Original, concise content is vital rather than large volumes of the same material.

3. Don’t use a Robot

It’s even worse to use a script or machine to automatically generate your content for you. There are programs which duplicate content, making only minor changes to give the illusion of originality. Again, if Google (or others) catch you doing this, they will severely penalise your results. Don’t be fooled by packages selling “300 Adsense websites made me a Millionaire in 12 weeks!” These are based on false assumptions; if you make 300 pages and if you somehow get 1,000,000 click throughs and if Google don’t realise you’re spamming and ban you faster than you can say, “Adsense” then you might make some money. But none of that will happen, so don’t get yourself perma-banned and lose money.

4. Don’t cloak.

If you design a website so your visitors see one thing, but search engines an entirely different thing is “cloaking”. It can require technical expertise to do, but it’s absolutely forbidden.

5. Don’t hide spam text

Whether this is through setting font colour the same as the background, or changing the visibility to hidden, or a dozen other methods, “keyword stuffing” is a big no-no. Offending sites will be removed from search engine indexes, meaning people won’t find you if they search. It even happened to BMW.

6. Don’t use unrelated keywords

Simple this one: Don’t repeat the same keyword on your meta tags over and over and don’t spam hundreds of unrelated keywords. While Meta keywords aren’t as important as they used to be, abuse can still lower your rankings.

7. Don’t link to spam sites

Google refers to these as “bad neighbourhoods”. These include, link farms, mass link exchanges and other such undesirable locations. If you’re unsure of whether a website is a bad neighbourhood, check it’s PageRank first (you might need the Google Toolbar for this).

8. Don’t use multiple title tags

A bit like keyword stuffing. Just don’t do it. Add a relevant and keyword rich title, yes, but don’t use more than one. Instead, make the most of your one title; for example, “John’s Used Cars – second hand cars, all approved!

9. Don’t use or distribute malware.

If you’re planning on distributing malicious software, shame on you. Even if you’re not, check to ensure that any software you are installing on your website is virus and Trojan free, otherwise you’re facing a Google death sentence.

10. Again now, don’t use a robot.

Don’t use a robot to automatically check your ranking and don’t use a robot to automatically submit your website. Apart from the fact you’ll do a better job manually, robots are despised as they tie up resources for everyone. As such, doing so will make Big G angry at you.

Instead…
Write good content! Simples!