The list of SEO "dirty tricks" keeps getting longer every day. I honestly don’t know how the spiders keep up. What most people don’t get is that a lot of these underhanded methods could cost you thousands of dollars and a lot of pleading with the search engine companies to get your site re-listed!

What’s Organic Search Engine Optimization 5 - SEO No Nos

Ah where to start when discussing all the dirty tricks some SEO companies pull to get rankings. These companies suck in new customers every day with promises that are hard not to resist but if you value your long term existence on the internet make sure you don’t get sucked in by them.

The first thing I should mention are some of the warning signs of a "black hat" SEO company. I may miss one or two but here is the "hit list":

• They promise top 10 rankings for keywords.
• They promise better rankings in a very short time
• They refuse to tell you how they intend to get you better rankings
• They promise everything that needs to be done can be done in a very short period of time

These are just a few of the telltale signs to watch out for. This is definitely a case of "if it seems to good to be true it probably is". So anyway, let’s get into some of the gory details about what these little tricks are. None is worse or better than the other and just about every one will get you into some deep trouble with the search engines.

• Hiding keywords on the page in one of several ways:
  • Setting the font color the same as the page background
  • Hiding keywords in a container and setting the display to none with CSS
  • "Floating" large sections of keywords off the page using CSS positioning
• Creating illegal doorway pages to your site
• Spaming Blogs to get you back links
• Enrolling your site in "link farms"
• Serving up different keyword rich pages to the spiders
• Hiding keywords in HTML comments in your pages
• Adding 1px transparent images to our pages with keyword stuffed alt tags
• using CSS styled heading tags to surround your page text (they look like normal text)
• Using bold or strong tags around every instance of your keywords (style to look normal)
• Using hidden form elements to stuff in keywords
• paying for links from unrelated sites

Well I think you get the idea here. There is always someone coming up with a new way to cheat the search engines and they will work for a very short period of time. You may in fact get some great rankings for a month or two but as soon as the search engines find you (or your competition reports you) your listings will be stripped out of the search results. You may be able to get listed again (not in the same positions of course) after completely re-doing your pages and begging mercy from the search engines or then again you may not. So you have to ask yourself, is a couple of months of good listings worth the pain and agony of starting all over again once you’re caught?

Final thoughts

I hope this little venture through the nuts and bolts of organic search engine optimization has opened your eyes to the ways you can get better rankings without all sorts of money or stupid tricks. Likewise I hope you now think twice when you look at an SEO company that just seems to good to be true! Search engine optimization can seem like a lot of voodoo to many people but if you start of with a great site, built properly your optimization problems will be few!