All businesses want their websites to rank high in the search engines. They use search engine optimisation (SEO) to help achieve this. However, not all SEO strategies are beneficial. Here are three SEO tactics to avoid:

Keyword stuffing

If your site is about red widgets, for example, then you want your site to feature at the top of the search engine listings when someone searches for the keywords “red widget”. You may be tempted to use these keywords as many times as possible on your website home page. This is known as keyword stuffing.

Above all, using this tactic will result in your web page content not reading well. Google is interested in quality content and will penalise you for text spoilt by keyword stuffing. Four to eight occurrences of a keyword on a page are sufficient.

Cloaking

One way people try to get around bad content due to keyword stuffing, is to hide keyword text so that it is not seen. The easiest way to achieve this is to use white text on a white background to make it invisible, this is called cloaking. Search engines recognise this technique and will punish you for cloaking by ranking your site lower.

Bad links

There was a time when you could list your website on directory sites whose only purpose was to provide links to other web sites. These became known as link farms. When ranking your site, Google does take into account links to your site, but it only ranks you on quality links from sites relevant to your subject area and, much like with cloaking, will penalise you for using link farms.

The art of SEO is about knowing what to avoid as well as the best SEO tactics to employ. For expert advice on ethical and effective SEO, contact us at the Pressroom.

John Murray

John is every inch the wordsmith and loves a game of Scrabble above all else. With experience writing for newspapers, John’s time at university was spent studying Creative Writing – something which comes across in his love of the pun.