Reputable SEO Consultants avoid practices that try to trick the search engines into ranking your web site and pages at the top of their search results. They know that search engines basically penalize site that use unethical techniques and practices.
SEO Experts worth your hard-earned money know that content-rich, well-designed web sites attract high rankings. They also know that a sensible overall marketing strategy is your best bet for web success.
If your potential SEO Consultants suggest any of these practices, look elsewhere for help in optimizing your web site for great search engine results.
SEO Experts Know Hidden Text is not Hidden
Web travelers can not see or read hidden text on your web page, but the search engines can. SEO Consultants who recommend hiding text may suggest loading invisible keywords on the page or hiding keyword-rich text behind layers or images. But the largest search engines, where your web visitors will likely come from, consider hidden text as "search spam." They will penalize your web site for using it. It may fool the search engines at first, but once they recognize hidden text in your web site, they will probably ban it from their searches. It's a fact that well designed, content-rich web sites are the best performers when it comes to search results. Anything the user can't see will be a red flag for search engines.
Redirects Can Also be Considered "Search Spam". There are legitimate reasons for using redirects, but a top search engine ranking is not one of them. SEO Consultants who recommend creating information-rich content for a page and then redirecting to another page in your website do not have your best interests in mind. In fact, the practice has been so common in the past that search engines have learned to penalize pages that use redirects and META refresh. There are valid reasons for and ways to use redirects. Even so, anything but a permanent redirect is a disservice to your web site. Perhaps you've decided to change the domain name to one that is more closely related to your content, and you don't want to lose the content you've already created. When you use a redirect for this purpose, it may be a good idea to use robot exclusion tags or set a reasonable time delay on the redirect to minimize possible search engine spam penalties.
Keyword Stuffing is a Definite No-No
When SEO Experts recommend loading your web pages META tags or content, they are not keeping up with search engine technology. In fact, this practice has been so abused by SEO tricksters that search engines no longer rely on META keywords tags for ranking pages. Another more recent approach is to add a paragraph at the top of bottom of the page that is chock-full of keywords, sometimes not even relevant to content. But stuffing keywords like this may be interpreted as search spam to the biggest search engines, or they may not be able to determine the relevance of your page to the search term. Today, search engines use techniques that favor related or themed keywords to judge relevance. Reputable SEO Consultants know that keyword stuffing simply does not work.
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