How Black Hat SEO Can Kill Your Website Marketing
(search engine optimization) is a crucial part of a website’s marketing
strategy, but black hat SEO is not the answer. Black hat SEO tactics
use methods that are dishonest at best and illegal at worst. The search
engines hate them, can smell them a mile away, and using them can leave
your website banned from search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. So
why do people use them? They want the quick fix. The "search engine
heroin," if you will. But the bottom line is this: there IS no "quick
fix" in the world of SEO. It's all a lot of hard work that yields
wonderful results if you spend the time and energy. Black hat is crap.
Problem
is...there are some unethical SEO companies that offer tactics that
will get your site a high ranking faster in the search engines than you
ever imagined possible. While some of these methods will work in the
short term to raise your page ranking, in the long term they have the
potential to destroy your site’s credibility with the very search
engines that you are courting for rank. And when Google slaps your hand,
you can guarantee yourself, your business's web presence will take a
beating as a result.
Here are the two most common forms of black
hat SEO tricks:
Keyword Stuffing
Stuffing your page full of
keywords that may be relevant to your business and website.
Keyword stuffing is a technique that is one of the more common black hat
tactics. This is sometimes simply the misguided idea that your most
important keywords should be all over the page. While keywords are
important, artificially stuffing your web pages with keywords can be
detrimental to both the user experience and your page rank with Google
as well. Instead of keyword stuffing, incorporate your keywords
naturally. You should aim for around 5% percent density of each keyword.
For instance, it you’re a dentist in Richmond, you’d want to ensure
that variations of a phrase such a “Richmond dentist” is mentioned
around five times for every 100 words. The only thing you should be
stuffing is a turkey on Thanksgiving. Leave the keyword density to a
professional SEO copywriter.
Cloaking
Cloaking any information
on your site, such as multiple keywords, is always a black hat
tactic. In the School of Google, it's an automatic trip to the
principal's office and you can count on a paddling if not expulsion
(insert WIDE EYES here). Cloaking is using hidden information that can
be found in your HTML code by the search engines, but is not seen on
your web pages by your visitors. The classic example is typing keywords
over and over, and then just making them the same color as your web page
back ground, most often, white. Web pages that do not deliver to
visitors what the search engines see in your HTML code can flag your
website to Google. While your website may be rewarded with a high
ranking temporarily, that soon will come crashing down once Google and
the other search engines pick up on the dishonest coding. What’s the end
result if cloaking is discovered? In the best case scenario, your site
will suffer a quick and severe drop in search engine rankings. The worst
case scenario is that your website could be banned from search results
permanently. Sound like something you want to put work into? Being
kicked out of Search Engine school? Perish the thought.
Any SEO
company that uses black hat techniques may get your attention with
promises of fast results. However, know that there's no magic bullet to
get you from where you are to where you want to go other than old
fashioned hard work. “Organic” SEO takes time. Yes, it may take a month
or two to start getting good placement in Google and the other search
engines, but by doing things in an ethical manner, the results are worth
the wait, and will serve you well for years to come.
Always
wear the white hat when it comes to SEO and you'll be a happy cowboy riding into the sunset.
