subject: What to Avoid When Aiming to Increase Traffic [print this page] What to Avoid When Aiming to Increase Traffic
Things to Avoid In SEO When Aiming to Increase Traffic Every other business person in the field of online business is always working hard to increase traffic to their website or blog. One way of getting traffic that has proved unbeatable is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, did you know that there are things you could do in the effort of optimizing your website that would cause more harm than good? Let me take you through some of the techniques that you should avoid as much as you would avoid a plague.
Keyword spamming
In the recent past, search engines would give a high rank to websites that had the highest keyword density for a given niche. Things have since changed and bombarding your web content with keywords and phrases for search engines will not work now. In fact, you could be penalized for it.
That is not to say that keywords are no longer important in determining the page rank of your website. You should still use the keywords in the content but not so many times that it is considered as spamming. To increase traffic to your website or blog, you should learn how to use the keywords appropriately and with the right density. A 2% to 3% density will be acceptable to most search engines.
Targeting search engines at the expense of users
Some SEO experts are tempted to produce content for search engines rather than for internet users. In other words, the content is designed with the search engines in mind and no effort is made to provide the user with quality content. This is called creation of door way pages and it is not only illegal, according to the rules of search engines, but also annoying to the users. This is because once on the website, the users realize that they have been tricked.
Participating in illegal link farms
Link farming is an SEO technique of getting links pointing to your website from other websites. While this practice can be carried out in a legal way, some people are at times tempted to participate in illegal link farms. Let us expand on what illegal link farms are for the sake of newbies.
If you have your website's link listed in many other websites, search engines will take these to mean that you have high quality content. It is like the other websites are voting for yours and you are rewarded with a high rank. If you get other websites linking back to your website for the content you have there, there is no problem. However, it is illegal to pay websites so that they link back your website. Such a practice is what is considered as illegal link farming and is usually penalized.
Irrelevant keywords and hidden texts
This relates to creation of doorway pages in some aspects. It is a practice of some webmasters to make use of popular keywords so that they have a high ranking not minding what the user intended to find when they searched the given keywords. Others would place text on the website that can be detected by search engines but not visible to users. This leads to users getting websites that do not help them when they search given keywords. These two techniques will see your website gain a bad reputation among users and could even be penalized by search engines.
If you ever try these techniques in the hope to increase traffic, you would be in for a rude shock to find your website not listed at all. It may seem to work at first, but that is just before Google and other search engines detect your malice.
