Most online businesses are now keen to the fact that ranking well in the search results for Google and other major search engines is a great way to boost business performance. However competition is fierce and it is often times tempting to pursue sneaky techniques to help boost your rankings. Implementing such techniques, also known as Black Hat techniques, is a bad idea and can cause your site to be entirely removed from the Google index. A few good rules of thumb are:

1. Ask yourself if what you are doing is good for your users.
2. Ask yourself if your techniques would be defensible if the Google police were knocking at your door.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Avoid stuffing your pages with irrelevant words

One form of bad practice is to stuff your pages with irrelevant terms. This is known as 'spamming' or 'keyword stuffing', and can only lead to irritating your users and making your business look unprofessional. Furthermore, it won't help with your sales conversions since the irrelevant words that caused a user to arrive at your page ultimately have little to do with your product or service offering. Most importantly, it will eventually lead to your being disfavored or banned from the search engines and that clearly won't help your sales conversions going forward.

I recommend: If you have already implemented this kind of technique, contact your webmaster or development team and have them remove the extraneous terms. You might lose some traffic in the short term but your conversion rates should improve, and you will avoid being disfavored by Google and other major engines. Learn more about keyword stuffing.

Don't use misleading title tags

When search engines list your page in the results, your title tag is the phrase that is hyperlinked to your page. This phrase should accurately describe your page offering, rather than attempt to bait the user to visit your site under false premises.

I recommend: Strive to be accurate in the keywords that you use and the functionality that you are offering. Attracting visitors to your site under false pretenses will only serve to raise red flags, annoy users, and discourage repeat visits. Learn more about title tags from SEOptimism.com.

Avoid adding hidden text or links

Another form of bad practice is to stuff your pages with hidden text. This is usually achieved by coloring your text with the same color as the background color of the page. Clearly this is of no benefit to your users and should be avoided.

I recommend: If your pages have hidden text, contact your webmaster immediately and have them remove it. This technique can be easily detected both manually and automatically and is an obvious violation of SEO best practices. Learn more about hidden text at Wikipedia.org

Do not implement cloaking

Google uses a robotic program called Googlebot to scour the web for pages to add to its search index. Cloaking is when you try to detect the presence of Googlebot on your site to serve it content that is not normally presented to your users. It is very important that Googlebot and other search engine robots see the same content that your users see when browsing your pages.

I recommend: Encourage your webmaster to stay abreast of Googlebot so that you can ensure that your site is always Googlebot friendly.

Stay away from linking schemes

Having other websites link to you can help boost your rankings, but there are many link scheme programs out there that you should avoid. Industry experts refer to these programs as Link Farms and they are easily identified by Google and other search engines due to the unnatural and duplicative patterns of cross linking that they implement.

I recommend: Stay away from Link Farms because they will adversely affect your own rankings and may even cause your site to be banned. Instead you should get your site listed in credible directories like Yahoo, DMOZ, and Business.com. Also avoid SEO companies that promise to get you ranked at the top of the results within a short time frame. Ranking well in search engines takes time and comes from producing quality content that other sites will naturally want to link to on their own volition. Learn more about Link Farms at Wikipedia.org.

Tips & Tactics

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• •  Avoid deals that sound too good to be true.
• •  Focus on providing the best user experience possible and the search engine rewards will come.