More and more people nowadays are trying to formulate their website to develop an online presence for their business, and it is increasingly seen as a measure of your success when you can get your site onto the highly ranked pages of the major search engines. The result has been an increase in Search Engine Optimization or SEO; put simply this means that your website is optimized in such a way that it is more easily found by the random searches of the net conducted by the search engines web crawlers. There are several ways to your web pages, including the use of keywords in your website text, creating keyword rich titles for your pages, establishing links with related sites and directories, and incorporating keyword enriched meta tags. So how do some websites take this so far that they end up being banned?



There are several mistakes that people make; it might seem clever at the time, but you arent going to fool anyone, and lets face it a low page rank can be worked on but once you are banned it will take a whole lot more work to claw your way back in!

The following are some come tricks that could quickly see you banned:

o Hidden keyword stuffing in pictures and using colored text

Keywords are those words that help identify the purpose of the site, if your main product is for example pet food and you will want to optimize the use of this phrase on your page. Some people are just determined to take it that step to far and in a bid to stuff this keyword into their page they will take steps to do so, whilst actively hiding it from the viewer.

One example is sites that have used colored text in the spaces on their page. By typing green text on a green background, for example, the site can have the keywords written over and over again, whilst they appear invisible to the viewer. It may seem like a clever way to boost your keyword content, but rest assured, you will be banned if you are caught!

The second option for keyword stuffing is to link the keyword into pictures via alt image tags. These are useful tags that are attached to the pictures and graphics on your page, stating what is supposed to be there in the event that the graphic or picture does not load. Some clever clogs out there will try and stuff this tag full of the keyword, again it serves no real purpose for the web page and is in fact a deliberate attempt to hide the keyword from the person viewing the page.

o Ridiculous domain names packed with keywords

Whilst it is recommended that you have a keyword enriched domain name if you wish to optimize your page for the search engines, here again people can take it too far. If your site is for pet food you really only need to put this in the domain name once, not 42 times! Search engines will locate your site if you are determined to take this too far and you will be penalized for it.

o Establishing poor quality links

Another thing to be careful of is that you dont establish links with disreputable sites. Good SEO is improved by links to quality sites that are relevant to your pages. This can be a more lengthy process, but it is worth the time and effort. If you are tempted to source your links from link farms, dont! The search engines will view these as tantamount to spam; you will get blacklisted and again it is harder to fight your way back into the page ranking than it is to climb up the page ranking!

o Keyword stuffing in Meta Tags

Finally, dont be tempted to stuff keywords into Meta Tags. As with the other forms of keyword and key phrase stuffing, you run the risk of being banned and it is widely acknowledged these days that the meta tag is not a measure of page ranking anyway. In short, why bother?

Optimizing your site for the search engines is a careful process that should be approached as such. There are undoubtedly ways that you can legitimately improve your rank, thereby increasing the flow of traffic to your site. Stick with these and be patient, the rewards far outweigh the alternative if you are suckered into any quick fixes and end up banned.