Professional SEO
There are many components to optimizing a site for the search engines, and there are those who try and beat the system by outsmarting the robots. Sometimes they get away with it, but there is always the chance that the robots will discover these hidden tricks. If you get caught, you get booted from the search engine.
SEO is more of an art than a science. While there are many factors to search engine optimization and website promotion, there are no cut and dry rules. The nature of this field leaves a lot of room for interpretation. There are professional ways to conduct SEO and there are some not so professional ways to optimize a website.
What makes one method of SEO professional and another unprofessional? This is a subjective topic, with no straightforward answer.
There are a number of ways in which some people try to outsmart the search engines, and there is even a term for it – known as Black Hat SEO, and it is best to avoid these practices. A sampling of the most common tricks is listed below:
- Hidden text – that includes hidden keywords
- Hidden links
- Sneaky redirects - A form of spam, these are redirects that automatically take you to a page that you didn't necessarily want to go to.
- Multiple domains pointing to separate web sites with identical content
- Pages overloaded with keywords
- Doorway or gateway pages
- Cloaking – The creation of web pages that display different one set of content to users and another to search engines
- Use of link farms to create fake link sources for inflated link popularity
Black Hat SEO is a Gray Area
These “Black Hat SEO” methods in themselves were not always viewed as unscrupulous or unprofessional forms of search engine optimization. It was the manner in which they were used. Consequently, due of this poor use of site optimization, the search engine algorithms have increased in complexity, thus making search engine optimization and the promotion of web sites more complicated.
Sometimes certain SEO techniques and strategies can be viewed as Black Hat SEO and sometimes these same techniques prove to be a good work around. For example, your web site has content that will not be picked up by a search engine because its web pages have extensive programming, and you want to use a <noscript> tag to list your site’s navigation. When there is a question, think about why you need to use the questionable SEO strategy. If it is something that you feel that you know is not done to be deceitful, then chances are it is fine to use that SEO technique.
Falling back on tricks to artificially boost your site in the search engines is poor strategy to use in search engine optimization, not to mention, a highly unprofessional way to build a business.
It takes as much time and energy to figure out Black Hat SEO strategies as it does to create a site worthy of linking to. Your time and energy are better spent focusing on creating a site that has relevant content and good navigation.
