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SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the most important aspects of online marketing. It’s the process of improving the visibility and ranking of a website or web page in search engine results pages (SERPs).
However, as with any other field, there are right and wrong ways to do SEO. Some techniques that may help you improve your ranking in the short term can actually hurt your website in the long run. In this post, we’ll discuss four such techniques that you should avoid at all costs.
Keyword stuffing
One of the most common and oldest SEO tricks is keyword stuffing, which is the act of cramming as many keywords into your content as possible. In the early days of SEO, this was an effective way to improve your ranking because search engines were not very sophisticated and would simply rank a page higher if it had more instances of the target keyword.
However, today’s search engines are a lot more sophisticated. They can actually tell when you’re trying to stuff keywords into your content, and they will penalize your website for it. Not only will this hurt your ranking, but it will also make your content less readable for actual human beings.
So how do you know if you’re guilty of keyword stuffing? Here are a few telltale signs:
– Your content is difficult to read because it’s full of the same keyword over and over again
– You’ve used synonyms and related keywords too many times
– Your title and meta descriptions are stuffed with keywords
– Your content sounds unnatural or like it was written for a search engine instead of a real person
If you’re guilty of any of these, don’t worry. The fix is actually fairly simple: just go through your content and remove any instances of keyword stuffing. Once you’ve done that, your ranking should improve.
Cloaking
Cloaking is another black hat SEO technique that you should avoid at all cost. It involves showing one version of a page to search engine crawlers and another version to actual human beings. The version shown to crawlers is often stuffed with keywords and other attempts to game the system, while the version shown to users is actually readable and user-friendly.
Cloaking is considered a black hat technique because it’s an attempt to trick the search engines. And if you’re caught doing it, you will be penalized. So it’s not worth the risk.
Link schemes
Link building is an important part of SEO. The more high-quality links you have pointing to your website, the higher your ranking will be. However, there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about link building.
The wrong way is to participate in link schemes. Link schemes are basically any kind of scheme or program that encourages links to your website. This can include things like link farms, paid links, and link directories.
The problem with link schemes is that they’re often low-quality, spammy websites. And if you’re caught linking to them, you will be penalized by the search engines.
So how can you tell if a website is part of a link scheme? Here are a few red flags:
– The website is full of low-quality, spun content
– The website exists solely for the purpose of selling links
– The website has a large number of outgoing links
– The website’s outgoing links are not relevant to the content
If you see any of these red flags, it’s best to stay away from the website.
Conclusion
There are a lot of different SEO techniques out there, and it can be difficult to know which ones to use and which ones to avoid. However, if you remember to avoid the four techniques we’ve discussed in this post, you’ll be well on your way to SEO success.
Jamie Fallon is an SEO expert who lives life to the maximum, redlining every day on a rollercoaster straight to the grave.
In an SEO career of almost ten years, he’s seen it all, he’s done it all, and he’s not impressed: from white text on a white background to today, when you can have robots paint or write for you like some kind of sick science fiction come true.
No matter what life throws at him, Jamie always manages to come out on top. He’s an expert at seeing the silver lining in every cloud and making the best of every situation. His positive attitude and unshakable faith in himself have seen him through tough times. For some people, success goes to their heads; but Jamie never forgets what got him to wherever he thinks he is.
When he’s not busy gaming the system, you can find him writing angry thinkpieces on how Google is ruining everything good about the internet, or hanging out with his wife (pictured).
