A good SEO strategy can be invaluable to your company. Increased visibility can
lead to more customers visiting your website which will, in turn, hopefully generate
more sales. There are many online marketing
companies out there that will be more than happy to offer you their services.
However, with great power comes great responsibility. Many unethical SEO companies
peddle suspect online marketing strategies to a naïve public. Due to the
involved nature of search engine algorithms and society’s rudimentary
understanding thereof it is frighteningly easy to fall prey to such companies.
The following are a few supposedly “sure-fire” strategies to look
out for.
If a company promises you submissions to ‘thousands’ of search
engines head for the hills. How many search engines do you know of, let alone
use? Google, Yahoo, MSN? There are less than a hundred and fifty credible search
engines worldwide. Flinging your site onto countless random search engines will
only get you into ‘link farms’, irrelevant junk pages that get filtered
out by proper search engines. More seriously – your efforts could get your site
blacklisted in the long run.
Repetitive submission to a single search engine is also not a good idea. You
simply cannot force an engine to index your site. If you didn’t get indexed
the first time there is probably something wrong with your site. Get it fixed
and resubmit, bombarding a search engine time and again is the equivalent of
getting an essay topic wrong, getting a poor mark and then handing the same
essay back to the teacher. Your marks won’t improve and you will most
likely end up aggravating the very authority figure you are trying to win over.
Further unethical practices include keyword stuffing, ‘cloaking’,
doorway pages, multiple domains with identical content, buying links and obtaining
links from bad neighborhoods. These strategies are all referred to as ‘Black
Hat SEO’ and involve attempts to improve a site’s rankings in ways
that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception.
‘White Hat SEO’, on the other hand, creates content for users,
not search engines, and then makes that content accessible to the spiders, rather
than attempting to derail the algorithm from its intended purpose. These strategies
add value to a product AND they work.
As with everything in life there are rules and if you break them you are bound
to be found out sooner or later. That said; play nice and the chances are that
proper SEO
techniques will do wonders for your business as an online marketing strategy
tool.