SEO Black Hat Tactics
Black Hat Search Engine Optimization Tactics have the potential to outright harm your marketing efforts.
Shoestring startups may have a great need to depend on natural traffic from search engines, and intelligent search engine optimization is critical to maximizing free and low cost marketing efforts. Use of black hat tactics is not a wise use of your resources.
Black hat tactics are those which search engine companies have specifically stated are not encouraged or allowed by them. Such tactics can get your site banned from the search engine indexes. Not something that helps your business.
Some of them will give you short term immediate benefits, but it will backfire and plummet to nothing when it catches up with you.
So, avoid the following types of search engine rank strategies:
Misleading tags or titles on your pages.
Invisible text or invisible image links.
Overuse of keywords in your pages. Use them naturally instead.
Any tactic that seeks to "trick" search engines into giving you higher ranking.
The goal of the search engine owners is to accurately index the contents of websites. If you help them to achieve that goal, you'll be on safe ground. If you try things that are aimed at elevating you above what they consider to be your deserved placement (by their rules), you'll actually do yourself more harm than good.
Focus on good quality content, and you'll not go wrong - good content ranks above everything else, and will get you further than all the tricks and technical tweaking ever will if you don't have good content.
See the Google Webmaster Guidelines for more information on what to do and what not to do.
Contributors: Laura Wheeler, EBWS
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