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LEE ODDEN: One of the things you need to be careful about when you are marketing your website is to not spam the search engines. Spamming the search engines is something that can actually get you penalized, or actually banned from the search results. So what are some of the things that are considered spam?

When you are keyword stuffing. In places you would normally optimize your website, if you are including five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty or more key words in those sorts of places where you really only need one or two key words, that’s spamming.

Another common tactic is to create duplicate content, or doorway pages. This is something that used to work in the late 90s and 2001-2002, but it’s something that is very easily detected by search engines, and you shouldn’t do it, because you’re going to get penalized. What you should focus on when you are optimizing your website is to focus on what’s good for the user. Short-term tricks are just that, they’re short term, and they can get you in trouble. What you want to focus on is creating valuable content that users are going to respond to, because that’s what search engines are doing—they are trying to identify those sites that offer the best user content possible.