Mark Wright’s Blog

 I find it fascinating how many times people will take a short cut as opposed to putting in the necessary work needed to make a project a success.  I would be lying if I said I wasn’t guilty of it myself in the past but almost always, the results were substandard.  In the area of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) this can be a problem as well.  The key to a high quality website is excellent content and understanding how the search engines ie. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, work.   If you put together a top flight program to optimize your website, it will enhance your rankings on the search engines.  Here are a few tricks to avoid when trying to achieve maximum optimization.

Mirror Sites – These are basically the same site with different URLs.  The process involves linking a bunch of sites together which basically has the same anchor text.  Since linking websites can help boost your search engine ranking, it gives the appearance of a well linked site.  The issue is that web crawlers are sophisticated tools and they can spot tricks such as this. 

Keyword Stuffing – This is overuse of keywords when they are not applicable.  Many times they are hidden in the text or randomly placed.  Another example is typing the keyword multiple times in a row.  The algorithms the search engines use are able to pick this up.  In the past, this trick would work because many of the search engines would just count the number of times the keyword was used but as technology increases, it can only get you in trouble. 

Cloaking – Cloaking is the process of submitting a page to the search engines that is different in content than what is actually seen by the person viewing the page. 

All of these instances are not only ineffective but can decrease your ranking and quite possibly get you banned from the search engines.  The only effective way to increase your ranking is through hard work and utilizing reputable search engine optimization companies such as Blue Sand.  It takes time and a lot of hard work, but the results will come.