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[/frame_left]In Pittsburgh SEO: What to Do Part 1, we discussed the many tactics that some uneducated or lazy webmasters, business owners and even search experts sometimes employ that can be damaging to your business. These include the purchase of large amounts of low-quality, irrelevant backlinks and indiscriminate submissions of press releases and articles to unrelated directories. These strategies are nothing more than money-wasters at best, but at the worst they can get your website sandboxed or even banned by the search engines. This is why it is critical that you develop an understanding of the practices employed by the Pittsburgh SEO firm you hire. The following are three additional strategies that should be avoided:
1.) Keyword stuffing and other on-page cheats
In order to find your business on the internet, both search engines and consumers use keywords. These keywords need to be a primary focus of the content on your web pages, but some people unknowingly take things too far and load their pages with keywords in an unnatural manner.
Stuffing your pages full of keywords that you think are related to your business can have an adverse effect on the readability (and by extension the credibility) of your text, and can send consumers bouncing away to other pages. Search bots will recognize this as well and as a result your rankings could suffer.
In order to "game the system" some people seek to get around keyword stuffing restrictions by placing invisible text on the screen, by routing bots to one page and human visitors to another and by using keywords unrelated to the products, services or information being offered. All of this is easy to detect and will likely result in substantial penalties at the worst, and a loss of interest on the part of consumers at a minimum.
2.) Spam
Spam doesn't just refer to the Nigerian "inheritance" and other scam emails that bombard your inbox. Spam can also refer to link spamming similar to what we discussed in Pittsburgh SEO: What Not to Do Part 1, or it can refer to a number of other spammy practices. This includes blog commenting for the sake of links alone- especially when automated, and automated forum postings. It also includes traditional email campaigns where the target list of consumers was obtained using questionable practices.
If your website is reported for spam activities it could be banned permanently from search results – even if you were unaware that anything unethical was occurring with your site. This is why it is imperative to only work with a professional Pittsburgh SEO company that you trust.
3.) Worthless content
We hear constantly on the internet that major search engines – most notably Google – are primarily looking for high quality, original content as a true measure of search weight. However, developing and distributing this kind of content is expensive, so in order to find a way around this some in the industry have begun creating and publishing inferior or even stolen and adulterated content.
A common practice on "the dark side" of SEO is to take the work of others – usually articles and web pages, and run them through spinning software programs that create hundreds of "unique" versions of the original work. This practice constitutes plagiarism and copyright infringement, but more importantly the quality of the resulting spun work is extremely poor and is not readable by traditional standards.
Another practice is to hire offshore writers to create a large amount of cheap content. But because these writers often do not speak (or understand) English as their primary language, the content isn't usually readable. And if it's not appealing to a human, you can be assured that a search bot will identify it as garbage content as well.
In order to avoid penalties and ensure that your website is as effective as possible, always query your SEO provider or web master to be certain that these techniques are not being used on your behalf.
To learn more and to see where your company stands among its competitors, call the number at the top of your screen now for a free consultation with an expert from our professional Pittsburgh SEO services company. The call is free and completely confidential, so you have nothing to lose and only success to gain.
