Don't hinder your search engine rankings with Unethical SEO

There are a number of search engine optimisation techniques that are frowned upon by Google and the popular search engines.

These SEO techniques include Spamming, Cloaking, Keyword Stuffing, Deceptive Page Titles, Page Re-directs, Duplicate Webpage Content, Link Farms and Doorway Pages.

The search engine optimisation companies that provide these services / techniques, are known as "Black Hat" SEO providers.

Here are a shortlist of the top worst SEO techniques:-

- Some web designers hide text that is heavy with certain keywords on webpages, by colouring the text with the same colour as the page background

- Using very small font sizes and using the same keywords over and over again

- Keyword stuffed Alt tags. The images tags that are used to describe an image.

- Re-directing a particular webpage to another webpage on a different website.

- Hiding your content off-screen by disabling a scrollbar or simply by making it invisible to the user

- Setting up title tags in your meta data that doesn't describe what is actually on the page

- Tricking Google's Spider into looking for a different set of webpages

- Creating content that is identical to that of another website over 2 or more other websites with different domain name and linking them all together

- Exchanging Links with websites that have totally irrelevant content to your website

If you are looking for high Google rankings (believe me we all are!!), stick with the Ethical, "White Hat" SEO techniques like Article Writing, Blogging, Social Networking, Link Building with relevant websites, keeping your content fresh and upto date daily with useful and unique information, submitting your website to relevant web directories, using RSS feeds that give your website audience something relevant and useful and don't over-use keywords in both off and on-page content.

The "Black Hat" seo techniques will get you a quick fix and for a few weeks, you might see your site achieving some interesting search engine results, but this won't last.

Posted By David Calvert - 27/06/2008

New Website Domain Names available from 2009

2009 will present businesses and individuals alike with the opportunity to buy a bunch of new domain names.

They will have suffixes by either region - .london, .newcastle, or by specific industry .lawyer, .webdesigner.

As search engines give a strong weighting towrards targeting keywords in your domain name, this will be a real help to businesses who want to explore new and existing markets, but haven't been able to thus far because of the lack of available domain names in their respective industries.

There is of course a downside to all of this. Spammers will be some of the first people to get their grubby little hands on these new domain names and there is already far too many spam sites out there.

Hopefully one day the internet authorities will invent a ruling whereby you actually have to register as a company in order to buy a domain name. This would go some way to stopping the spam websites and give genuine businesses more of a chance to target their customers.

We will always have the problem of people and companies buying up domain names to sell on at a profit and this will of course happen again next year when these new domains come onto the market.

My advice to you would be to keep a look out on the web as soon as we hit 2009 for these new domain names suffixes and think about your keyword targeting as part of your ongoing search engine optimisation strategy.

Posted By Ben Warman - 04/07/2008