The Unwritten Rules for SEO Optimization

In life there are just certain things that don’t need to be said. By the same token there are certain rules that are unwritten or unspoken. It is usually a case of right versus wrong. People know certain things are wrong and they just shouldn’t do them. By breaking that code you willing cross a line over to the dark side.

Is this a bit ominous? Yes, but honestly that is what happens. There are rules like that for SEO in the world of internet marketing. By breaking certain rules you will immediately get labeled and tagged as a person or company that is willing to cross the line in exchange for profits. Those types of actions might generate some short turn results, but over the long term they generally affect your brand negatively which can be costly.

There are acceptable actions and those that are a bit shadier in the world of SEO. Not sure which side of the line you are falling on? Check our quick list and compare what you are doing to it.

The 6 Rules You Shouldn’t Break

You shouldn’t need to stoop to tricking people to going to your site. The general term for this is ‘black hat’ because then you become the villain. Don’t do these things:

• Keyword Stuffing – This is an annoying abuse people use to try and make something irrelevant relevant. The idea is to stuff a paragraph with a wide range of keywords to draw in hits from a broader range. Most of the time this means you are creating nonsensical sentences and paragraphs which viewers gain nothing from. Some people try and sneak these in at the bottom of the page while others put them anywhere to get the hits.
• Hidden Text – This goes right along with keyword stuffing except you hide the words. This can be done with color shading, transparency, setting an image file as a background, and quite a few other methods. The typically result of getting caught doing things like this is having your site banned which is always great for business!
• Duplication – In a nutshell you copy and tweak a site to make a virtual duplicate. Many affiliate sites still try this method by manually adjusting the sites to avoid the search engine duplication checks. Really it is a silly idea these days because as soon as someone reports the site it is done for.
• Interlinking – This is a popular idea that is frowned upon. You create multiple sites and link them together in different ways to increase cross traffic and build the link popularity and rankings.
• Buying an Audience – This honestly is just pathetic. People actually pay others to follow links, make posts, and do things that make it seem like more people are visiting a site than really are.
• Spamming for Traffic – Ever been reading an interesting thread posting when you come across a comment that doesn’t make a lot of sense to the subject and includes a link to another site? That is a very common spam method for trying to direct people to a site. Much like buying an audience, people get paid to post thousands of responses and links on websites, social media outlets, and really anywhere possible. It is like graffiti on the web.

Are there other black hat SEO tactics? Of course there are. The internet is full of people that are more than willing to do whatever it takes to make money. However those people get labels attached to them of being unscrupulous and having to stoop to the lower levels because the products and services they offer aren’t good enough to stand on their own.

The bottom line is what kind of business do you want to run? Is your brand important enough to you that it stays clean and untarnished? For most businesses with a goal of being profitable over the long haul, the right move is to avoid black hat methods and instead follow the unwritten rules of right versus wrong.