What Trends To Avoid In Seo

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SEO is a complicated process, for a lot of different reasons. One of the biggest ones is the fact that search engine algorithms are a closely guarded trade secret; as secretive as they are, though, it’s well known that Google uses well over 100 different factors to determine page rank. Their goal is to make it difficult for webmasters and designers to come up with page ranks that their sites don’t deserve. On top of that, the environment changes constantly; what was working in ‘04 didn’t work in ‘05, and what worked in ‘08 doesn’t work in ‘10. Here’s a roundup of some bad and/or outdated practices for SEO marketing:

* Keyword metatags. It’s been a few years since this has been a usable strategy. Text that’s not visible to users (i.e. keyword metatags) got dropped as a factor for page. Title metatags and description metatags are still important; keyword metatags are not considered by Google.
* Keywords stuffed in “invisible” ...
... text. This is one that will get your site banned. It includes tricks like using text in the same color as the background, or text that’s off the area of the page that’s invisible to the user. Bots can see this and will dump your site into the same bucket with spammers.
* Purchased links. Algorithms look for words like “advertisers” or “sponsors” near the link, as well as unrelated links that don’t relate to the topic matter on the page itself. That’s what they pay editors for. If your site’s links appear to have been purchased, Google might flag it as being useless from a page rank standpoint; if your site engages in it too much, you can be banned completely. Cultivate the links you need, don’t purchase them. With all that being said, link buying is still widely used in the SEO World.
* Flash animation. Looks great, and users love it †but search engines can’t read it. If you’re going to have Flash on your site, have lots and lots of text too. Search engines love text.
* Cloaking. Everyone should have known about this one by now; it was very popular with spammers a few years back. It’s the practice of showing different content to the crawlers (different from what’s seen by the users themselves). There are bots that are developed specifically to find cloaking, and it’s a sure fire way to get your site banned. There are other ways around your page rank and SEO problems without having to resort to cloaking.

Just keep it on the level and don’t waste your time trying to figure out ways around the search engine’s algorithms. Even if it pays off in the short run, there could well come a day when you suddenly find a big chunk of your traffic and business has disappeared.

Contact us to catch the right trends in SEO. We can help. You can call us at 1-800-736-9618.