Avoid these SEO tactics or your Online Home Business could be ruined in hours!

With recent widely publicized updates by Google to their search engine algorithms, there’s even greater need for care when trying to optimize your web site pages. If you use certain tactics for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you’ll now pay a heavy price in lost traffic when your website plunges in the search rankings.

Old products and advice about SEO may no longer work as they once did. More importantly these old products and advice may even kill your website in the search rankings if you implement them today. I’m talking about methods that were very recently acceptable and worked well – but No More! Google has caught-on to many techniques that were designed solely to push your site up in the search rankings. If Google has done this, the other search engines like Bing, will also follow the trend.

I’m not talking about Black-Hat methods that really are unethical ways to try and get a website to appear higher on search engines than it would normally be, by backdoor routes or trying to deceive the search engines. Try a Black-Hat or even Grey-Hat method and your site will surely be placed low down or disappear completely from the page rankings. Even worse, your domain name could be “sandboxed” so it will never again appear in search results.

It can take forever to get a domain restored to search engine visibility again, so be very careful about your SEO methods, aids, and the advice you follow.

Secondly you will create a bad visitor experience, because your site won’t give them what they were searching for. You will not fool the search engine web crawlers in today’s online world. Their algorithms are too advanced and well developed for even the most savvy marketer to gain an unfair advantage for long.

Don’t ride the Borderline Train!

It’s so easy to fall for common mistakes that will penalize your website placing in the page rankings. What was once borderline acceptable is no longer tolerated by the likes of Google.

Using a lot of keywords in your site is now a questionable practice. You need to place your keywords properly in the title and headers and text to avoid this. If you stuff your text and headings with a lot of keywords, it won’t boost your rankings but get you a very poor search position. You may even get your domain name blacklisted by the search engines if you seriously overload your headers, meta tags, and pages with keywords.

Another borderline technique involved placing invisible text stuffed with keywords into your site in white with a white background, or any same color text and background. This invisible text is hidden from the reader but the search engine crawlers will read it all.  But all the search engines have been wise to this tactic for a long while.

Portal pages appear as a legitimate way of catching the web crawlers out.
A portal page is simply a false index page that is used to attract the web crawlers. The customers themselves will likely never see this page. Again the web crawlers know this tactic and will rank your site low in response.

Recent Google updates have addressed the problem of unnatural  link generation. Getting hundreds or thousands of unrelated links to your site will not help your page rank but hinder it. Links have to be natural and relative to your site and are best built by normal methods such as articles, signature footers in your posts, social networking, niche directories, etc., etc. It all takes some time and work, but nothing worthwhile is gained by shortcuts.

Be totally ethical with SEO and with your customers

Your ethical online home business must avoid black hat, grey hat, questionable SEO methods and “back doors” at all costs. There really is NO back door to getting listed on page one of Google or any of the other search engines, despite the claims or a few publications on the market.

Also be wary of viral traffic generation schemes unless you can be totally convinced they’re ethical and are not likely to get marked down in the future by the search engines. Be extremely wary of scripts you instal on your web server, some may get your web account banned by your hosting company or get your site sand-boxed by Google.

Be Patient!

Far better to develop a normal website using either HTML editors, WordPress, Joomla, or similar content management or authoring systems. Make all headings natural with just the main keywords. Make your sub heads similar and never stuff your text so it appears illogical to the reader.

Provide a quality experience for your visitors and you will get a better ranking as time goes on. First page on Google in a few hours is an unrealistic goal. Be patient and if your site is worthy, it will rise up the rankings over the weeks and months. If you’ve picked the right niche and keywords your online home business could be at top place in a month or two.

Watch out for more tips on this Online Home Business Blog

 

Lance Hallingford

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