Rules to Avoid for SEO Optimization

There are some rules for SEO in the world of internet marketing. By breaking certain rules, you will immediately get labeled and tagged as a person or company that is willing to cross the line in exchange for profits. These types of actions might generate some short-term results, but over the long-term they generally affect your brand negatively which can be costly.

The general term for this is black hat.

1. Keyword Stuffing

This is an annoying abuse people use to try and make something irrelevant relevant. The idea is to stuff a paragraph with a wide range of keywords to draw in hits from a broader range. Most of the time this means you are creating nonsensical sentences and paragraphs which viewers gain nothing from. Some people try and sneak these in at the bottom of the page while others put them anywhere to get the hits.

2. Hidden Text

This goes right along with keyword stuffing except you hide the words. This can be done with color shading, transparency, setting an image file as a background, or some other methods.

3. Duplication

You copy and tweak a site to make a virtual duplicate. Many affiliate sites still try this method by manually adjusting the sites to avoid the search engine duplication checks. It is not a good idea these days because as soon as someone reports the site it is done for.

4. Interlinking

This is a popular idea that is frowned upon. You create multiple sites and link them together in different ways to increase cross traffic and build the link popularity and rankings.

5. Buying an Audience

People actually pay others to follow links, make posts, and do things that make it seem like more people are visiting a site than really are.

6. Spamming for Traffic

Ever been reading an interesting thread posting when you come across a comment that doesn’t make a lot of sense to the subject and includes a link to another site? That is a very common spam method for trying to direct people to a site. Much like buying an audience, people get paid to post thousands of responses and links on websites, social media outlets, and really anywhere possible.