As with most things in life, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do SEO. And I’m not just meaning the wrong way that leads to lack of success – I also mean the wrong way in terms of ethics. Unethical SEO techniques can often lead to huge short-term success (note the phrase “short-term”), but if you want to get real results then make sure to avoid the two biggest black hat ideas:
Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a definite no-no in the world of SEO, and it probably won’t even work. If you fill your content with pointless keywords that are just thrown in without any thought to readability, you’ll instantly be penalised. Search engines don’t like to see too many keywords clogging up a page (they can be pretty clever when they want to be) and can blacklist you in a heartbeat, and not to
mention the poor reception you’ll get from your readers. Even if you do manage to sneak a few keyword-stuffed pages through you won’t gain any business from it because your readers simply won’t stay, and isn’t that the whole point of SEO?
Spamming
A similar concept really, except here we’re talking about spamming the rest of the net rather than your own site. Some webmasters take it upon themselves to post their link wherever they can, even if it’s completely irrelevant to the site or discussion in question. How many times have you seen a post or status comment which is simply an ad or a link to a different site? And how many times have
you clicked? Probably not very often, and if you engage in this practice you’re likely to see yourself banned from the sites you were spamming or blacklisted from search engines.
Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list of unethical SEO techniques (there are many more, such as creating websites for the sole reason of providing backlinks), but these two are the biggest you need to watch out for. While they can sometimes work in the short-term they won’t pay off in the long run, and when it comes to SEO you need to look at the bigger picture. If you want lasting success that’s the only way it should be, but if you really want to see how it’s done make sure to come to us here at Manual Link Building and we’ll gladly advise.
