The SEO practises to avoid at all costs

Whether you’re a website designer or are in the process of having your own website built, the desire to see it topping the search engine rankings is a strong one. Most of us, once we have a design chosen and a site up and running, turn our attention to achieving position one, page one ranking on Google. While SEO is incredibly important, it’s also a long-term process – meaning it’s easy to get frustrated and be tempted to try and game the system. Black hat SEO and other questionable tactics promise immediate results and a way to shortcut the ranking algorithms but, they could lead to you getting banned from Google altogether.Before you give in to temptation and fall for a ‘guaranteed page one’ promise, here are the SEO practises that you should avoid at all costs – or risk being banished entirely from the search engine results pages.

Black hat anything We’re just going to say it: steer clear of anything black hat (or even grey hat!). There is no such thing as an easy route to position one. That means you’ll want to avoid questionable tactics such as article spinning, keyword spamming, hidden text on websites and anti-competitor actions such as leaking fake poor reviews for rivals, or posting fake positive ones for yourself. Negative SEO The fight for Google prominence is fierce and it’s likely at one time or another you might be tempted to fight dirty. By that, we mean taking part in a negative SEO campaign. These are action designed to hurt your rivals’ rankings rather than focusing on boosting your own. Run at the first sound of phrases such as keyword scraping, spamming links from questionable sites to competitor sites or worse, fraudulently send link removal requests to send competitor sites tumbling. Keyword stuffing We all know that content is king and that you need to include a certain amount of keyword related content on your domain. Beware though, it’s very easy to go too far in the other direction and create content that is stuffed to the brim with keywords and written purely for the purposes of bolstering search positions by winning over search engine spiders. This does not work in 2018. Search engine algorithms are sophisticated and can decide between poor quality content which has been keyword stuffed and good quality content which serves a purpose and is of value to the reader.Don’t create content purely for the sake of it or for Google only. Focus on your reader, create useful, informative and educational pieces and you’ll find that you start to naturally acquire good quality backlinks and what’s more, generate conversions and meaningful conversations with your customers.