In this installment of my “Top Ten” tips to better Search Engine Optimization, I’ll be reviewing “10 Things to Avoid When Optimizing Your Website”.

SEO isn’t easy! Let’s just call it what it is, Hard and Time Consuming. A major mistake that a lot of people make, in an attempt to make things easier, is looking for short cuts to optimize their website. Many of these shortcuts provide short-lived result, but can harm your rankings in the long run (or even get you black-listed from search engines!). This is where I like to refer to a couple of old sayings to help remind people to stay focused:

-          “If it’s worth doing… It’s worth doing right!”

-          … and, “If it’s too good to be true… then it probably is!”

Keep your eyes on the prize folks! Don’t let other people take advantage of you and your business. Avoid bad neighborhoods, link exchanges and farms, don’t keyword stuff and… well… just keep reading, and Good Luck!

1. Avoid Bad Neighborhoods

Basically, a bad neighborhood is a website that uses any unethical techniques to help increase their ranking in search engines in general. So don’t link to websites that utilize any of the tactics that I’ll be listing in this article, and don’t let them link to you.

Caveat lector: While you have control over who you link to, it is often difficult to get your site removed from a link farm if it has simply added your site on its own. If you find that your website has been added to a directory of questionable character, check to see if there is a “Remove Link” button, or try sending an email to the site owner. Beyond these options, your choices become much more expensive and time-consuming.

2. Don’t Use Link Exchanges or Farms

You may receive an e-mail from another company asking if you will provide a link to their website in “exchange” for them providing a link to yours. Nine times out of ten this is a “Link Exchange,” and it provides no purpose except to try and increase the other site’s Page Rank and Link Popularity. Unless the other site has relevancy to yours, this is deceiving and malicious in intent.

Link Farms have the same purpose only on a greater scale. Links farms target companies with relevant content (real estate agent websites are a big user of this technique), and ask them to include a list of a number of other “out of state” companies that are generally in the same field. In return all of those companies will return a link to you giving you multiple links (farm links) from a number of different websites with relevant content. There was a time when this could work, but that was long ago (in a time far, far, away). This technique is viewed as deceiving and with malicious intent.

3. Don’t Keyword Stuff

Keyword Stuffing is self explanatory, but for those of you that are new to SEO… let me explain further. Keywords are words that you will expect people to find your site with when searching with a search engine. For example, if you have a website that is selling “chocolate truffles” you don’t want “chocolate truffles” to appear in every other sentence. That is Keyword Stuffing… don’t do it!

4. Don’t Use Cloaking Techniques and Doorway Pages

Cloaking and Doorway Pages are similar, but I’ll attempt to explain, in a nutshell, what they do:

-  Doorway Pages… are “keyword stuffed” pages that are set to redirect to another page. This other page is the real page that is meant to be seen, but is poorly optimized. What happens is that the search engines end up indexing the keyword stuffed page. Before you go thinking this is a great idea let me explain that search engines are “hip” to this and have been for years now, although they may sometimes not catch it right away they eventually will and when that time comes around you can expect to be banned from their index. (Note that Doorway Pages are NOT Landing Pages.)

-  Cloaking… is when your website detects who is visiting your website (search engine bot or real person) by the IP address. If your site detects the IP to be a search engine bot then it redirects it to a keyword stuffed page. Otherwise it will take the real person to the real home page of the website. Again… once you get caught you can count on being dropped from that search engines index.

5. Don’t Use the Same “Title” and “META” tags throughout your Website

When you are developing your website hierarchy it should be obvious that each page will tackle a different topic. Therefore it should go without saying that your Title and META tags should be unique from the others across the site as well. Unfortunately this is a big oversight that a lot of people make, because they don’t want to be bothered with the tedious task of keyword research for every page, and then developing more copy for the META description tag as well as the perfect Title Tag and META keywords tag. Well I’m here to tell you folks… it’s worth the time. But don’t make the mistake of using this as a place for keyword stuffing… keep the stuffing for the turkey and use these places to lay down your targeted keywords to help search engines better index your website’s pages.

6. Don’t Use Hidden Text

Ummm… Don’t use hidden text. What’s hidden text? Hidden text is when you put text somewhere on your website that is the same (or similar) color as the background color it’s sitting on top of. For example you place white text over a white background. Why not you say? Well think about it… you won’t be able to read it because it’s white on white. So you can’t read it, but guess what… the search engines can. So what some people do is use this technique to keyword stuff thinking that because visitors can’t see it then it must be ok. Right? Wrong! Once again the search engines are well aware of this Black Hat Technique and it’s only a matter of time until they find out if you are doing it.

7. Don’t Use Frames

Yeah… Don’t use Frames! For those of you still living in the 90’s, don’t you think it’s time to update that website? There are many reasons not to use Frames, but I only need one. Search Engines have trouble indexing pages with Frames… That’s enough for me… Don’t use Frames!

8. Don’t Forget to Optimize Your Images

Make sure to optimize all of your images for your website. One of the factors that search engines take into consideration is the overall download speed of you website. One of the main contributing factors to this is the size of your photos. There was a time in web design that anything over 30k was considered suicide, but nowadays with faster internet connections it’s considered great to be under 200k (80 – 150K is optimal).

9. Don’t Forget to Check the Download Speed of Your Finished Site

Hey! Check your download speed to make sure you are within the limits that you pre-determined for yourself. There are many free tools available on the web to test this, just Google “website speed test” and pick one. This isn’t simply courtesy for your potential website visitors (which is a good enough reason to me), but search engines also penalize web pages with excessively large file sizes and slow download speeds.

10. Don’t Believe Everything You Read About SEO…Except for this of course!

No, really. Everything I have listed here are things that need to be avoided at all costs if you want your website to rank high in the SERPs. But don’t just take my word for it. Do some research and find out for yourself. What you’ll find is that there is a lot of information out there that people will claim helps you, but until you try them it’s hard to know if they’re right or wrong, “Black Hat” or “White Hat”. That’s where NetSource Technologies comes in to play.

NetSource has spent years developing “White Hat” procedures that will help your websites reach specifically targeted audiences on the internet. Audiences who are relevant to your products and services will always bring your website a higher ROI. So if you find that Search Engine Optimization is a little too much for you to grasp, let our experts at NetSource Technologies Inc., take care of it for you and sit back and watch your ROI increase.

Google is running a business.  Their business depends on returning the most relevant and useful search results to web surfers, so that they’ll continue to use the Google Search Engine, click on Google ads, and generate revenues.  Because quality search results are so important, Google takes people who try to cheat the system very seriously, and they have very well-documented rules that they use to identify search engine “spammers.”

Break any of these rules, and your rankings will suffer, or even worse, your site can be black-listed… removed entirely from Google.  You may benefit from a brief boost in search engine rankings, but Google always catches up. Trust me; you do not want to fight Google in order to get your website re-listed.

Rule 1 – No Duplicate Content or Mirror Sites

We all know that copying someone else’s text and images is wrong, and we’d never do it.  But Google also penalizes you when you copy your own content.  Say for instance you have a corporate website that has been around for 10 years, but now you want to build a focused mini-site for a featured product or service.  There is a temptation to post the same information that already appears on your existing site – product information, company info, etc.  However, Google views this as duplicate content.  And since the existing site is older, your new site will be ignored as a copy and won’t be indexed.

How to avoid this issue:

• Re-word and re-organize text.  A good rule of thumb is to be at least 60% unique.
• Add exclusive content to the newer website, so that a significant portion of the site is unique.
• Consider creating images for content that is not relevant to the search engines on the new site – like charts, technical specs, testimonials, etc.
• Be sure meta tags and title tags are also unique.

Rule 2 – No Keyword Stuffing

Google knows all of the “tricks” that black hat, or disreputable, SEO practitioners try to use in order to rank for keywords and key phrases.  One of the most common techniques that people are familiar with is keyword stuffing, or adding the keyword or phrase you want to rank for over and over and over to your pages.  There are many keyword stuffing techniques (see below), and Google’s algorithms will identify and disregard these techniques.  At best, you wasted time (and money, if you paid someone else to do it for you) and your rankings will not improve in the long-run; at worst, Google might identify you as a spammer and remove your site entirely from search results.  Warning: keyword stuffing may seem to work in the short-term, but Google always catches up with you…

• Gibberish Text – Have you ever visited a website that has introductory text on the Home Page that makes no sense? Instead you find yourself wading through paragraphs of keyword-stuffed text, typically with lots of links. Not only does this kind of text turn off your website visitors and reduce the usability of your site, Google will notice that your keyword density is unreasonably high.
• Invisible, Low-Contrast or Very Small Text – Instead of filling your pages with gibberish text that might look bad to your visitors, you may be tempted to stuff some keywords onto the bottom of your pages in very small print, or written in the same or a very close color to the background of the page.  Google is on to this trick, and can easily identify it.  In fact, you need to be careful that your well-intentioned web designs don’t have any elements, like captions or legitimate small-print, that might flag Google accidentally.
• Alt-Tag Stuffing – Another shady method is to overload your images’ alt and title tags (the text that shows up when you hover over an image on a web page) with your keywords. Not only is this an easy method for Google to identify, but most search engines virtually ignore alt and title tags these days because of over-abuse of this technique.  The same holds true for some other HTML tags that can only be viewed by browsers.  Most experts agree that meta keywords and meta descriptions are not factored into Google’s rankings anymore.
• Invisible Links – One final method that some “experts” like to use, is to create invisible links in a page’s HTML code to keyword relevant pages.  They do this in the hopes of building what’s called “link juice,” or link relevance. The theory is that search engine spiders will read these links and factor them into your page’s ranking, while website visitors won’t be able to see them.  Google doesn’t take kindly to this kind of cheating though, and will penalize your page’s rank accordingly.

The methods above can sometimes show up in your page accidentally or without malice.  Knowing about these potential hazards to your page rank can help you avoid any unexpected results.  The most likely to get you blacklisted and booted from the Google index is Duplicate Content, however all of them will be detrimental to your ranking in the long run.

The “tricks” below, however, are widely recognized as one-way tickets to the Google black-list.  They are employed by disreputable, black hat SEO “experts” who make outlandish promises of #1 rankings.  They’ll use these techniques to give you a quick and dramatic boost.  Then after you’ve already paid for their services, your website will suddenly disappear from Google.  Getting yourself re-listed will be an uphill battle and can sometimes take years.  So proceed with extreme caution if a service provider is using, or proposes to use, any of the following techniques:

Rule 3 – No Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are created specifically for spamming search engine indexes, or “spamdexing”.  These pages contain keyword optimized text that attracts the search engines, but when a visitor clicks on that indexed link, they are quickly redirected to a different page entirely. These pages are also referred to as bridge pages, jump pages, or portal pages.

Rule 4 – No Link Farming

Link Farms, or Link Farm Exchanges, attempt to take advantage of the weight search engines place on in-bound links to a website when determining a site’s rank.  Generally, the more in-bound links your site has, the more “popular” your site appears, and then the higher you rank.  Google in particular easily identifies link farms, and penalizes web sites with links on those sites, typically by banning them from the Google index.

Rule 5 – No Blog Comment Spam

This technique tries to exploit the same page rank weight placed on in-bound links in the above technique. However, instead of placing your site in a link farm, this technique adds links to your site on relevant blogs by commenting on posts.  In general, becoming active on relevant blogs and commenting thoughtfully is a respected and recommended technique for improving your search engine ranking.  However, using automated posts, making nonsense and/or unrelated comments, and typically abusing the blog’s community by only posting promotional comments, are all considered spamming. Google takes a dim view on them all.

Google is huge, no doubt, but one area they have struggled is in establishing a social networking platform to connect their huge user base.  The more time users spend with Google – the more opportunities for Google to monetize off of them.  Granted, they have a lot of cool and free tools to play with, but there is a reason Google Adwords appear in your Gmail inbox.  Having a social network that users can hang out on for hours at a time is the big nut Google hopes to crack, and Google’s primary social networking nutcracker for the last few years has been Orkut.

Orkut?

Yeah Orkut.  You may have seen it if you have a Google account, maybe even quickly stopped to find out “what is this?” only to realize it is yet another social networking platform.  Everyone you know is already on Facebook, so why bother with Orkut – ever get a friend request from someone on Orkut?  I haven’t either.  Why bother – no one else is.

But Google has resources – lots of resources – and is continuing to find new ways to tap into the social networking goldmine.  The most recent big splash they made has been with Google Wave, a revolutionary new platform that has the potential to move Google into the Facebook and Twitter dominated spotlight.  However, another product has been recently released by them that taps into the social media network and at the same time could have a very drastic impact on your website.  This product is called SideWiki.  Oh, and pardon me while I giggle, as the word “wiki” always does that to me.

What is Google SideWiki?

Google SideWiki is a browser extension that you install that enhances the functionality of your Firefox or Internet Explorer browser (Chrome version coming soon).  With the SideWiki installed, you can now comment on any website that you visit and read the comments of other SideWiki users. Everything from SideWiki displays in a separate sidebar.

Is that it?

Basically, that is the gist of it.  My first thoughts were pretty underwhelming.  I mean we have tons of websites now where we can rank and review other sites.  I can bookmark a site in Delicious.com and write a review that other Delicious.com users can read.  I can put a StumbleUpon thumbs up or down review on a website I am visiting that other StumbleUpon users can see.  Seemed like more of the same.  But then it occurred to me that these comments and reviews are not happening on a third party website, they are happening on the site being visited.  This is important in that although I can moderate the comments posted on this blog, I can’t moderate the comments made on SideWiki.  I can also opt not to list comments on this blog, but I can’t opt out of having SideWiki users commenting on this blog.

But isn’t SideWiki a separate application that is part of a browser sidebar – not on the website itself?

Yes, and it can also only be seen by other SideWiki users – not visitors to the site that don’t have SideWiki or are not logged into their SideWiki account.  But it is still content that is displaying side-by-side with your website whether you want it there are not.  It would be like have an office building that Google puts up blank signs right next to and allows random people to come along and spray paint messages about your company on.  Some comments may be from satisfied customers  (great), but some may be from less than happy customers (not so great), some may be from competitors (uh-oh), some may be spam messages for Viagra (oh great) and some just may be juvenile drivel (yuck).  You paid good money for a nice website, why should it get junked up with user graffiti and framed in with content that is out of your control.  While the word “wiki” may make you giggle too, SideWiki could very well be no laughing matter for owners of business websites.

Now that I have (spray) painted a scary picture, not all is horrid.  Google SideWiki can be a nifty tool to communicate with your site visitors.  At the same time, I don’t see it becoming mainstream anytime soon, so most visitors will never see those SideWiki comments anyway.  Right now, SideWiki is just a trend to be aware of.  Google has the resources to push it hard or to repackage it into another yet-to-be-invented social networking tool that shows up a few years from now.  And what Google does, other developers will mimic and implement into their bag of tricks too.  So even if adoption of SideWiki is slow, you will see more of these types of tools in the near future.

So, you’re still thinking this whole blogging thing is silly? Yet you want your website to rank well and bring a lot of visitors to your website?

If these two statements apply to you, then truth be told, you’d be silly not to consider a blog.

Think of it this way – if you have an average sized website, say 10 content pages, then you have 10 pages that have a chance of being ranked in the search engines. Now, it is difficult for any page to effectively be optimized for more than a few keyword phrases – 3 is reasonable, although some would argue that even that number is high. That gives us 10 pages and 30 keyword phrases. Now, add in the fact that the search engines like active websites, so if your site is static (only updated once every year or two), then your site is not keeping the search engine bots interested.

Now, let’s take those 10 static pages and 30 keyword phrases and add in a blog that you update only once a week with a new post. This adds 52 new pages over the course of a year and 156 keyword phrases that can populate the search engines. Plus, as an actively updated blog, the search engines will be eager to visit it on a regular basis and quick to list any new content that you post. When you launch a new product, service, sale, coupon, marketing campaign, promotion, job listing, new office location, event or other news worthy item, your blog post about it will show up immediately in the search engines for searchers to find it. If your site has been static for a year, and you update the site to reflect a special sale coming up next week, it might not make it to the search engines in time – whereas, it may only take an hour for the blog to get listed.

Blogs are a “force multiplier”, to borrow a military term. Use all the artillery available to help you succeed with your business online.

Can you and your company afford not to take into consideration Goggle’s Googlebomb algorithms? First, for those of you that don’t know what it is, a Googlebomb is when people try to purposely push another website to rank for a search term that they didn’t intend it to rank for. You might ask… “how can this effect me and my site?”. Let’s say that you own a popular restaurant and you do everything “White Hat” with your web site. Your web site has developed over time and you have earned the rankings you wanted, but your cross town competition doesn’t hold the same moral values as you, and so they decide to try and setup some Googlebombs against your web site. They setup a number of different Blogs and forum threads that refer to your restaurant as something derogatory, and next thing you know your web site is ranking for “Worst Italian Restaurant in City”.

Now, I’m not writing this to put a scare into anyone as Google has algorithms in place to filter these Googlebombs. If you would like to read further about these Google algorithms just click the links in this sentence and you will go to Matt Cutts blog where he explains them in depth. What I am curious about is whether or not the algorithms are smart enough to realize if a company or organization is actually assembling a link building campaign or if they are trying to implement a Googlebomb. If it were the case that Google’s algorithm can’t decipher between the two, then it stands to reason that your web site could be penalized for link building or even repeating a targeted keyword term more than 2 or 3 times on your web site.

So what’s the answer? While some people have decided to ignore it and just deal with the repercussions of whatever bad press they may receive from this, others have decided to take action. The answer is “two-part”. The first part is building a Search Engine friendly web site that utilizes White Hat SEO tactics. This entails a number of different things that we will save for other blog posts, but the most important thing to remember is to write content for your visitors and not the Search Engines. By writing for your visitors you will limit the number of times you use your targeted keywords and find other related keywords that  complement them also. You can also used these different keywords as alternative navigation within your web site to generate more credibility for yourself. The second part is “patience”. Yes Google has algorithms in place to filter through these Googlebombs, but like everything else in life, it takes time to get it right. If you find that you are a victim of Googlebombing and you have done all the right things to ensure your SERPs, just try patience as it will take time to Google to decipher between the two, but in the end the two algorithms they have in place should catch any persistent problems with derogatory keyword rankings. the catch is that they only run every few months so the key is “Patience”.