If are looking for a company to do your SEO there are a few things you need to consider to make sure you select the right person. The aim of this article is to list a few things that should not be doing. So if you get recommended any of the things in this article run a mile and look for someone else to help you.

1. Hidden Text

One technique that used to work in the past is adding your keywords into your site in the same colour as the background of your site. This means that the search engines can read them but your visitors can't. There was a time when this worked but the search engines have developed and can now detect this. We have seen clients try this out and only end up with a ban from Google and needing to start all over again with a new website.

2. Link Farming

There are a lot of facilities out there where you can pay for links from a particular site. This site will then link to loads of websites with its only purpose being to supply links. This is not a good thing to go for and although you won't get a ban the search engines will not count these links and so you will just be wasting your money.

Along the same lines, the same approach is taken to reciprocal links. The search engines can now detect link exchanges to a depth of around six websites. This means that any link exchange scheme will be next to useless for your SEO campaign.

3. Duplicate Content

There are 2 things to consider when you look at duplicate content. The first one is if you are taking content from another website. The search engines will detect that you have duplicate content and are getting better at detecting the original source. This means that your page will not get ranked in the search engines and will add very little value at all.

The second is if you are duplicating your own content on more than one page. Some websites do this as the number of pages your website has significantly affects your search engine rankings. However if you are doing this the search engines will quickly detect it and will probably take away most of the value that you could be adding.

4. Page Cloaking

This is the process of creating a web page that you optimise for certain terms and that the search engines see. However when a visitor clicks on the link they are automatically redirected to another site that is about something different. This is a technique that has been used to get websites ranked for terms that are not relevant to it. Search engines have developed so that they can now detect this and will ban your site if they suspect you are using it to artificial rank your website. If you do need to redirect a web page make sure you use a permanent redirect that the search engines will follow as well.

The above are not all but just some of the things you should be avoiding. If you are advised to follow any of the above techniques, don't. The only result will be that you will harm your site and your business.