Death by Google

SEO is the practice of improving the structure of websites and pursuing direct links for the purpose of improving search engine rankings – unfortunately, it is not an exact science.  There are methods that will definitely improve your search engine rankings and your page rank, but more importantly there are methods you should avoid at all cost to help your site remain visible in search engines!

It is always a good idea to improve the usability of your website, there is always room for improvement, either from a usability standpoint or in this case an SEO standpoint.  With this in mind, it is a good strategy for any web based business to employ a member of staff full-time to manage site content.  A web-shop with thousands of products cannot afford for the IT Manager or any other member of staff with full-time duties, to be in charge of its optimisation in their spare time.

Below is advice on what you should do or not do, to avoid SEO suicide!

Spamming

Spamming is the use of only keywords in the text – so you might see a paragraph that makes no sense, does not inform the user about what is on the page and just continually babbles useless keywords, then doesn’t link to anything useful.  The annoying thing is that this often pushes them up to the top of the Google rankings - but only for a short time. 

Google does not care about what your shop is, what technology you used to develop your particular product, who the managing director of your company is and so on, what it does care about is relevancy and Google attempts to find relevant pages for its customers – and let’s face it, if it failed in this task, people would stop using Google and it wouldn’t be in its currently hallowed position.

The thing about relevancy is, that too little mention of the keywords is not relevant, as is too much.
Too much is spamming means that the site is not relevant because it has been designed for Google and not users. 

Spamming can also be using underhand methods in order to achieve good rankings – but by breaking best practice, Google can choose to penalise the site and it can disappear from its position – either by being found out by Google’s bot when spidering or by being reported as spam.

The following are methods that should not under any circumstances be used:
 

Hiding text in invisible divs

Making the text the same colour as the background or anything which means that the copy isn’t on display on your page.  This really decreases your chances of maintaining a high position in the search engine rankings.  You might get a brief stint at the top but it won’t be long before the site crashes out again.  Chances are, whatever you think of to trick the search engines, they thought of it before you and know what to look for when they index your site.  There may be ways around it in the short term but for most web businesses, it is never worth the risk.

Templating of pages

This seems for the most part that it could work, just fill in a few blanks here and there and the copy is different enough to stand up to scrutiny – this isn’t as detrimental as spamming, but it’s still not a great idea!!  As a rule of thumb, the page must have at least 40% of different content from any other page to not be considered duplicate content – duplicate content completely devalues your page – Google considers it is either plagiarism or an attempt to increase chances of getting visits to either one page or another.  Also writing individual copy for every page of your site was never supposed to be easy, but it is the best way to ensure your site becomes more important in the eyes of the search engines.

Buying too many links in Link Farm sites

These are ranked too and you get a link from hundreds of invalid places, can actually work to devalue your site.  So choose your backlinks with care!

Avoid using dynamic pages with ‘?id=1’ 

The search engines don’t really pay any attention to the differences and think they are all one page – don’t be confusing, make it as easy to use for the search engines as you would like it to be for your users!

Have masses of images on your page before the copy begins 

Google indexes 30k of your page and if it never reaches the text before this point, your page cache will be very bare indeed!!