When looking for help with SEO online, have you come across a provider promising “TOP RESULTS WITHIN WEEKS!”? If you aren’t sketched out by these claims, you should be.
Real SEO professionals know that earning top positions in search engine pages takes a lot of time and hard work. Fake professionals use what are known as “black hat” SEO techniques to try to cheat their way to top results. These techniques may dupe search engines at first, but once the search engines catch on to what is happening, they will heavily penalize your site.
Take a look below at the search engine optimization techniques you should never use or let someone else use for your site.
Black hat search optimization techniques to avoid
- Buying links — Inbound links from reputable sites help search engines view your site as an industry authority, thereby increasing its ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). However, one technique SEO “professionals” used to use was buying links from “link farms.” These purchased links used to carry weight that made your site rank higher in SERPs.
These days, purchasing links not only doesn’t help your SEO, it can harm it. Google and other search engines are likely to penalize your site for purchasing links if you do this. - Spamming comment sections — Ever scrolled through a comment section to see some robotic “This product helped me …” content followed by several links? These are attempts to create free backlinks. However, they typically aren’t followed by search engine crawlers and can also tarnish your brand.
- Keyword cloaking — Keyword cloaking is the practice of hiding “invisible” keywords on webpages. These typically blend in with the background, such as using white keywords on a white background. The idea is that a search engine will see these keywords and interpret the page as having useful information. However, nowadays, search engines are much better at distinguishing between cloaked keywords and actual, helpful content.
- Keyword stuffing — Similar to keyword cloaking, keyword stuffing is also easily identifiable by search engines these days. This is the practice of artificially stuffing content with keywords rather than focusing on writing helpful content that is genuinely optimized.
- Spinning articles — Article spinning is similar to duplicating content (also bad). It involves using software to find existing content online and then to rephrase it as something “unique.” Search engine crawlers consider this plagiarism and are very good at catching it these days.
Want to attract new visitors to your website? Burg & Co. can help
Increasing traffic to your website plays a role in increasing conversions and leading to new clients. However, it’s difficult to attract visitors to your site when you don’t know what to do. Fortunately, this is what we specialize in at Burg & Co.
Our team has years of experience in helping businesses improve their digital presence to attract new leads and retain existing ones. If you’re looking to perform better in search engine results and attract more visitors to your site, we’re ready to talk to you to see how we can help. Contact our team today for more information about digital marketing or to schedule a complimentary consultation.
