freedesktop - Oct 2009 - [fdo] internetdefensegroup.com, Top 5 search engine optimization Mistakes

internetdefensegroup.com, Top 5 search engine optimization mistakes
 There are a lot of ways to promote your website and, unfortunately, a lot of
these methods are mistakes. Here is a list of some of the more common mistakes
(often referred to as Black Hat SEO) that you should steer well clear of.
 1. Bad Neighbourhoods
 These sites are also known as free for all (FFA) pages and link farms. They
serve no other purpose other than to list tens of thousands of unrelated
websites. Not only will these sites not provide your site with any traffic,
certain search engines will ban sites who participate.
 2. Over Optimization
 Optimizing your web pages for a particular search engine can be a good thing.
Over-optimizing can defeat the purpose, however. Search engines are catching on
quickly to pages that appear 'over-optimized'. Stuffing keyphrases into
your pages is the most common problem. Never use hidden (invisible) text to add
keywords. You will get caught, and your site will get banned.
 3. Doorway Pages
 Doorway pages are orphaned web pages that are typically optimized for a
particular keyphrase and a particular search engine. They are promoted to the
search engine in an effort to achieve high rankings. They are not linked back to
by any other page on the website and, as such, search engines are able to flush
them out quite easily and penalize the entire site.
 4. Traffic Generation Scams
 Services that purport to drive lots and lots of traffic to your website are
typically not very useful. The traffic tends to come from seedy places like
domain names that have lapsed in payment or commonly misspelled domain entries.
Most of the traffic that hits these pages is accidental and is therefore of no
value to you. Other traffic may come from other participants in the program who
are required to visit other websites to gain 'credits' for their own
site. Again, this traffic is not targeted and therefore of no value. Some
traffic may even be generated by automated software!
 5. Shadow Domains
 Shadow domains are small, optimized, supplementary websites designed to drive
traffic to a different website. The way this works is that an SEO company will
design and optimize a website on your behalf. The danger here is that the you do
not own this new website; the SEO company does! This means that if the
relationship sours, they may choose to redirect this site's traffic to
whomever they choose (see #4 above), or even sell the site to one of your
competitors! Be very, very careful of this technique, as some supposed search
engine 'experts' even use this method (no naming of names here,
however).
 One final note: Any company that tells you that it can achieve
'guaranteed' rankings is either lying to you or using some of these
Black Hat techniques. Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee a number one
result within (unpaid) search results. When choosing a search engine
optimization company to work with, be sure you feel comfortable with them and
trust them (e.g. money back guarantee). And if you decide to promote your
website yourself, consider yourself a little better educated against these
common mistakes.
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