This is the penultimate episode of my eight part guide to Search Engine Optimisation; the part art, part science approach to getting your site listed in the search engines and attracting traffic to your site. The previous parts: 1. Common Design Faults, 2. Choosing Tasty Keywords, 3. Your Title Tag, 4. Page Copy, 5. Meta tags and 6. Alt Tags are all available when you click on the appropriate link above.

This edition of the guide will focus on the dangers of techniques that you need to avoid. LeadGenerators is a responsible organisation that does not use so-called ‘spam’ techniques. Anybody trying these techniques, whether knowingly or not, will sooner or later find their site blacklisted from the search engines. As the majority of your traffic is likely to come from the search engines, spamming is a near-suicidal move, and will send your site to SEO Purgatory.

Let’s look at the other side of the story now. The first six parts of the guide have concentrated on what you should be doing; the seventh will focus on what you must avoid at all costs. The basic point here is not to do anything that is designed to trick the search engines into listing your site better. All the tips we have covered so far in this series are all aimed at helping the search engines find what they are looking for on your site, and it is by no means just the smaller guys who are guilty of these techniques!
 
One of the easiest ways to get your site blacklisted by the search engines is to put up a list of keywords on your site. This is less prevalent than it was in the earliest days of the internet, when many sites would routinely have a long list of keywords at the bottom of the page (for example Florida holidays, Florida vacation, USA holiday, Florida trip, Florida villas). There are almost no legitimate reasons why a list like this should appear in the code or text of a page outside of the ‘keywords’ meta tag, and the search engines will consider any similar lists to be spam, and send your site to SEO Purgatory.

In the cell next to these guys are the site owners who try to bring traffic to their site by listing reams of irrelevant keywords in the keywords tag. If your site sells flights to France and your keywords include Caribbean cruises you will get penalised!

Another trick, which the Financial Times apparently fell foul of last year, is to use the same colour text on your page as the background colour of the page; whether you are including a link or more keywords. Search engines will consider this as spam and may well blacklist you.

Another offence meriting a custodial sentence in SEO Purgatory is the uploading of multiple instances of the same tag. Each page of your site can use no more than one title tag, description tag and so on. Search engines detect this and view it as spam.
   
Along the same lines is the sin of duplicate content. For example, an old trick was to duplicate a page of your site, give the new copy a different file name, and put up both pages. Search engines will read the content of these pages; see that they are duplicates, and are likely to view them as spam.

The last trick we’re going to look at on today’s rogue’s gallery is the doorway pages. BMW were briefly taken off Google’s results earlier this year for providing different information to website visitors, depending on whether they were using Javascript (invisible to search engines) or not (in which case most of the site was inoperative). See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4685750.stm for further details.

Just one part of the SEO guide still to come, and it’s a round up of all the bits and bobs that didn’t quite fit into any of the previous categories. Pay attention, there may be a quiz at the end…

Huw Thomas - Search Engine Optimiser, LeadGenerators