3 Black Hat Techniques to Avoid With Your SEO

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) it’s hard to keep up with the latest changes in algorithm information. These changes may seem difficult to understand for the novice marketer or business owner but if you do everything naturally, you won’t have a problem. If you start to get impatient with your SEO progress, you may turn to techniques that claim to get you ranked faster. Some of these techniques are called black hat techniques. Black hat techniques are considered to be ways that you can cheat the Google codes and get your site ranked faster. These techniques should be avoided at all costs as they could cause your website ranking to drop considerably or even worse, ban your site altogether. Some of the top black hat techniques are keyword stuffing, bad links, and using duplicated content.  

Keyword Stuffing

  This consists of inserting your keywords where they don’t fit in naturally. Some go as far as to write their keywords in white font so it’s invisible to the viewers but Google can index it. Keyword stuffing also includes adding keywords that are unrelated to your content just to get more people checking out your site. Google has ways of indexing your site and it will be obvious to the site crawlers if you are using your keywords naturally or not.  

Bad Links

  It may be tempting to purchase 1,000 links from china for $5 just to get your site ranked quickly but in the end, you will find out that this is a horrible idea. Along with keywords, you will want to gain links to your site in the most natural ways possible. You don’t want to link your site to a hardware store if you are in the funeral home business. You will want to work on gaining links manually through community sites, directory sites, and through word of mouth or guest posting to websites related to your niche.  

Duplicate Content

  It would be too easy to find a site in your niche, and copy their content over to your site word for word but this is another black hat technique that could get your site banned. It’s always best to write content for your site in your own words. If you need to purchase content from elsewhere, make sure it is 100% unique. There are several sites that can check content for uniqueness. If you’re receiving content from someone else, run the text through a site like Copyscape or a plagiarism checker to make sure it has not been copied.   If you want your site to get ranked well in the search engines, don’t focus on the number of links, keywords, or speed of content. Everything should be as natural as a conversation you have with your friends. If you do things the natural way, your site will be given priority in the search engines. If you’re thinking of using any shortcuts to try to cheat the Google bots, you will be caught (eventually) and trust us, recovering from Google penalties can be very costly and time-consuming. If you need help learning more about the right way to implement SEO, contact us at YourSocialStrategy.com today and we’ll get back to you shortly.