Sunday, August 8, 2010

Avoiding Shady Practices In SEO And Internet Marketing

By Adriana Noton

SEO and Internet marketing are not an easy process. Some people use shortcuts instead of putting more effort to create legitimate high ranking websites. These people sometimes can use unethical SEO practices that create unhealthy environment on the internet. Black hat SEO is optimizing a website with unethical behaviour.

Examples of unethical behavior in SEO are keyword spamming in pages, spamming other sites with links to their websites, creating doorway pages, and invisible text. Keyword spamming or keyword stuffing means putting as many keywords as possible in content. The content itself will have low or nonsensical quality.

Creating back links your websites can be very frustrating. Some people use link spamming links to get many backlinks. They go to other websites or forum and post the links to their websites without following the website's rules and regulations. They usually place their links in the comment section of other people's websites. This is certainly very annoying and disruptive since the comments section or forum board are supposed to be a place for discussion and opinion. Many programs have been created to curb link spamming, deleting such comments, and banning the offending practitioners.

Doorway pages and invisible text have some similarities. Both of them contain content that are invisible to users. These pages and texts are created to trick search engines into thinking they have content that do not actually exist. Keyword stuffing is usually used in this pages and texts.

Some websites use computer programs to automatically create thousands of new pages covering many topics. These pages are left blank, containing only links or ads, or sometimes they are filled with stolen or scrapped content from other websites.

Not only unethical behavior annoys other net users, this behavior also hurt the websites they intend to create, which defeats the essence of Internet marketing. The websites created with such disregard for ethics will have terrible brand images. Users can report such sites to search engines for spamming. Users will also avoid such websites in the future. You will not gain loyal viewers who will return next time. Instead, always opt for ethical SEO practices for your Internet marketing strategy.

Search engines always try to improve themselves so they can present the best results for their users. They are focusing on getting rid of black hat SEO practices by penalize these websites heavily. Your website rating will drop instead of rising, or your websites might be banned from search result altogether, making your hard work useless.

Aside from search engines, there are many other reasons why using black hat SEO will hurt your website. Internet users have become more knowledgeable in filtering good websites and bad websites. There are many add on tools to block or warn users of bad websites. That means that although search engines have not caught the unethical practices and the website still has high rating, there will be warnings or blockage from other sites or add ons programs to keep users off these pages.

You might know about these shady practices when you hire your SEO and internet marketing experts. After you gain knowledge about black hat SEO practices, you should be able to avoid them and pay attention to the strategies that your SEO experts use.

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