Search Engine Optimisation - Do's and Dont's
by Inge Jones

Everybody had heard of breaking the law before. But what most webmasters don't realise, is that you can be breaking Cyber law on your website by simple ignorance. Like in every country, there are certain rules to obey, in the same way on the Internet, there are also rules to obey. These are called Search Engine rules.

A recent upset ripped through the webmaster world as Germany's BMW website, http://www.bmw.de got banned from the two major Search Engines, Google and Yahoo, due to unethical search engine optimization practices. It was promptly re-indexed when they removed the technology the search engines frowned upon, but in most cases, a website could be banned from a search engine for longer than just a week or two.

Many web site owners thrive on business they get through their websites. Unfortunately, a lot of webmasters are unaware of search engine rules and regulations. In the game of SEO, people try to get their website ranked high on search engines any ways and means possible. Very often, however, there are illegal and unethical practices that are being followed, many times, unknowingly.

What aspects of SEO should you be avoiding?

• While it is nice to stuff as many keywords into your meta tags as possible, this practise should be avoided. Keyword stuffing is a way webmasters try to artificially rank their websites higher, by either putting as many keywords into the meta tags as possible, or into the actual page content. The search engines pick this up, and considers this spam.
  Doing the maximum to optimize your website for search engines is great, but going as far as implementing cloaking is going too far. Cloaking is a technique by which search engines spiders sees one type of content, while the human eye sees a different type of content.
  
• Redirection scripts is another way of cloaking where a person is redirected to a different page as soon as they enter the website. This is also considered a black hat practise for the simple reason that many people make pages that have little or nothing to do at all with the actual website content. The pages are designed to get high rankings, but when you actually click on those links, the description does not match the content of the site at all. Stay away from redirection, and you're on your way to being safe.
• Another technique that is frowned upon is lots of internal network linking and link farms. While it is true that good, high quality links can only benefit your website, linking internally with a specific network of sites all the time or joining link farms is a dangerous practise.
  

• What many webmasters love to do is to create hidden text on the website. The text cannot be seen by the human eye, but search engine spiders can pick it up. It is often done by means of making the text the same color as the background, or creating layered text with z indexing. The bottom layer will then be extra text for the search engine to pick up on, while the top text is the actual content of the website. Both these hidden text methods are frowned upon strongly by search engines.
  
• Domain spamming is becoming more and more popular. Have as many domains as possible, linking to your website, and you are guaranteed top rankings! WRONG!!!! This is a dangerous technique, as search engines will immediately pick up on websites implementing this technique. While not all search engines will ban the site completely, a lot of search engines won't keep one domain, but just delete the whole lot.
  
• Adding as much text as possible below your content on your website for search engine spiders is also a very risky technique. In the past, this text was hidden, but these days the text is just put in at the bottom of the website content, to create a bigger impression for search engine spiders. This is very risky as search engines are very clever these days, almost up to the level of artificial intelligence where websites are concerned. If they have not yet picked that up on your website, they will, very very soon!
  
• Using absolute positioning to position parts of your text off the visible page frames is also a method of spamming and should be avoided at all costs. Remember, you want to get ranked on search engines, not blanked.
  

In the end, it seems like there is nothing much that can be done to optimize a site for search engines without getting banned. But the trick is this. If you create your website within the specifications of search engines, then it will do much better than running after every trick to try and optimize the website. Often these websites with all the SEO tricks attached gets penalized strongly for the techniques they implement and don't get high rankings at all. But the truth is, stick to the basics, and everything will go well.

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