Today, in this highly competitive internet marketing industry, we try to promote sites as quickly as possible in order to capitalise on the huge number of potential customers using search engines as their doorway to specific products and services.
Google continues to be the world’s favourite search engine with an estimated 55% of people starting their web browsing through it’s search page. For this reason, search engine marketers are targeting Google as the platform on which to have their websites listed in the top results.
Google’s exact ranking criteria are unknown to all but a small selection of Google engineers. Search engine marketers therefore use a selection of tried and tested techniques to help websites rank in the top ten of Google’s search results. Although no search engine professional can know all of the techniques to help a website rank highly, they will know about the techniques and pitfalls which can dsmaged and restrict the rankings of a website.
Below are some of the activities that should be avoided if you are to stay within Google guidelines.
Keyword Stuffing
When writing content, titles and headers for your website, carefully consider the keywords that may be applicable to the page, and ensure they’re present in these vital elements. However, remember to write for your users first and formost, so avoid going overboard, stuffing keywords into the content so that it becomes repetitive or nonsensical. You may feel that plugging in additional keywords might aid you in your search engine rankings, but in reality, it can have the opposite with sites using this method being penalised and banished from the search results.
Hidden Text
Many webmasters, in an attempt to add more relevant keywords to their website’s copy, try to hide text within their content pages; This is usually done by merging the font color of the text with the background colour of the page. Although not visible to the site’s users, search engines can see it and will penalise for it!
Link Farms
Avoid linking to sites that interlink with each other for the sole purpose of increasing their link popularity, trying to manipulate their ranks in Google. These sites will usually be poorly managed, often consisting of a number of pages containing little more than pages full of irrelevant links in particular order. These pages differ to most online directories, which review sites before inclusion, and add them to relevant categories. Linking with link farms is a sure way to ruin your website’s trust factor resulting in a massive fall in search engine rankings and in some cases even banning from the Google index.
Cloaking
Cloaking is defined as serving a normal page to the users whilst serving an optimised version of the same page to the search engines. Although this method can help you to rank highly for a short period of time, Google will eventually pick up on, and the consequences can be severe, even for huge multinational companies.
Fluid Creativity has a online marketing team that can help you rank well using what are considered ‘White Hat’ tactics which meet with Search Engine Guidelines. Contact us today to discuss our online marketing services.
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