Search Engine Optimization (SEO tricks) you should avoid

In the bid to rank higher in search engine results, some bloggers may be introduced to some bad search engine optimization tricks (usually called black hat SEO). How dis works is that, they trick the Search engines (e.g yahoo and google) to make their websites or web pages appear higher in search results.

But how do you know which SEO method is right or wrong? That is the question which brought about this post. In this article, I will point out some tricks to be avoided when optimizing your sites for search

engines.

   What is Search Engine Optimization(SEO)?

According to wikipedia "Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,^[1]news search and industry-specific vertical search engines" (you can read it in full here).

SEO tricks you should avoid are as follows:

• Automatically generated Doorway pages: doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing. (Spamdexing is the act of spamming the index of search results by inserting results for some particular search terms for the purpose of redirecting visitors to another page or site.) 

          Doorway pages are also known as bridge pages, jump pages, gateway pages, portal pages, entry pages etc.

• Cloaking: cloaking is a black hat SEO technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is not the same as that presented to the visitor's browser.(read more about cloaking here)

• Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing is the act of loading your pages with a lot of keywords in the meta tag or content of a page. This is done by repeating same keywords over and over again. Over time, so many search engines have ignored the use of these meta tags. 

• Hidden texts and links: This is also considered as a bad SEO technique. How this works is that Search Engine Optimizers use some tricks to hide texts and links from visitors of the site, but these texts and links will be visible to Search engine bots. Some of the tricks used is by blending the text color with the background color and also placing text behind image using CSS.

• Loading a page with a lot irrelevant links: This is another bad practice some Search Engine Optimizers adopt in tricking search engines. This is done by adding some frequently searched term -which are unrelated to the content of the page- to some part of the page in order to make those pages rank higher for those keywords in search results. Of which after been clicked on in search results, users find something entirely different.

• Duplicated content on multiple pages within a site: Black hat SEOers also use this trick to rank high in search results. What they do is: they have the same content across many pages on the same site, so what when something related to the page is searched for, their pages come out first in results. Search engines especially google detest this act and punish the perpetrators when caught by banning the site involved.

There are still more black hat SEO tricks than the ones we've talked about in this article, but i believe these are the most serious ones. More black hat SEO tricks to be avoided will be revealed in my subsequent posts, so be sure to stay tuned. Submit your email address below so you get notified of all my articles as they are posted.

Conclusion: while these tricks can yield visible results within a short period of time(i.e make your blog or site rank higher in search engines), the result is just temporary and when caught, it could make your blog get banned by search engines and am quite sure you do not want that. 

Your turn: do you also know some black hat SEO tricks or you would like to ask some questions about what I have discussed above? or perhaps you would like to point out somethings that shouldn't be in this post. Feel free to air your mind by simply dropping your comments below.