Basic SEO: Tricks and Tips
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I wrote an article recently about what search engines hate the most when they are combing through a site, trying to decide whether or not to index it. Well, hate was probably too strong a word. It should have been more along the lines of what search engines find annoying. This article, on the other hand, will delve into what they truly hate – namely, when web developers try to trick them. We will then get into ways to add content to your site.
Tricking a search engine generally involves showing the searchbot a different web page from the one shown to the visitor. Unfortunately, searchbots are not that sophisticated when it comes to what they will or will not read on a web page. However, as search engines have grown over the years, they've gotten a lot better at recognizing when tricks are being used. Getting caught can result in a much lower ranking or an all-out ban from the search engine. Either way, it's important to know what techniques are considered deception so that, if anything, you'll know what to avoid.
Some of the most ubiquitous techniques involve manipulating keywords in some way. Keyword stacking (or stuffing), in which the same words or phrases are repeated over and over, or using keywords that are unrelated to your site are fairly obvious methods. Granted, these are very old and barbaric techniques, but they have proven to be effective in the past. For example, hiding keywords is usually done by making the text the same color as the background and using a very small font size. You can also use hidden fields (<INPUT TYPE=“HIDDEN”>), hidden layers (use a style sheet to put a text layer under or outside of the visible layer), or simply place text inside of a <NOFRAMES> tag. You can often check for hidden text by either checking the source code or clicking the top of the page and dragging to the bottom, highlighting everything in between.
Hiding links became popular because search engines rely so heavily on links to determine a site's purpose. You can easily make a link look exactly like the rest of the text on a page, or at least the text surrounding it. And any piece of text can be turned into a link, even punctuation marks. Basically, links can be hidden in the same way as ordinary text.
Some people have been known to make duplicate pages. This is where they make copies of their own keyword-rich pages and add them to their site or to a site with a different URL. The purpose of this is to get more than one top entry on a search results page (some search engines display more than one page from a site). However, search engines have tools to help find duplicate pages, so people have turned to slightly modifying the page before using it again. One of the more unethical variations of duplication is called page jacking, in which people steal pages from other sites because they have performed well.
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