Despite claims from alleged industry experts that SEO is dead or is about to become extinct, it still seems to play an important role in establishing the online presence of a company. Without search engine optimisation, your website will be buried beneath the hundreds of millions of others. Many of these sites will be your direct rivals and are enjoying sales while you rot. SEO still has the ability to make or break an online business which is why some unscrupulous webmasters are intent on using black-hat SEO strategies in an attempt to get ahead. Below we will look at some good, bad and downright ugly SEO strategies.
GOOD
Viral Content & Infographics
Instead of searching for links yourself, get users to give them to you. If you do this properly, you could be rewarded with a huge amount of links. However, creating high quality infographics is not easy and requires the services of an expert graphic designer. If you go down this route, it is essential to get it out on the web nice and fast. The best places to begin the process of seeding your content are Facebook and Pinterest. Ensure that the infographics link back to your site.Directory Submission
The purpose of directories is to help search engines like Google to decide where a website should be ranked. When you submit to directories, you’re likely to increase the crawl rate of your site which in turn improves its SEO power. It’s a safe and legal link building method. However, it’s important to perform some research because many directories of this kind are fairly low in quality. Bad directories can actually damage your ranking.Social Media Sharing
This is an obvious SEO strategy and one which is being utilised more often by online businesses. Your site should have social media share icons from sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Pinterest as this is an easy method of improving SEO ranking. Oddly, Google has claimed that social shares have little effect on a site’s page ranking despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Even if there is little merit to it, having your website seen by potentially millions of people on social media networks is hardly a bad thing is it?Guest Posting
Most people are aware that constantly updated blogs are an excellent way to drive traffic to a website. Another excellent method that is seldom used is guest posting on someone else’s blog. This enables you to get your views across to a whole new audience. If they like what you have to say, they will begin to visit your site. Most bloggers would be thrilled to get someone else to write on their site as it saves them some work!Images
Photos and videos play a major role in the success of websites and online companies. YouTube has several billion daily views. Imagine if you created a video and it went viral! Even placing images on your website will help attract more traffic, especially if you add keyword orientated tags and descriptions. Images also make a website look more attractive so when visitors arrive at your site, they are more likely to stay than if they were met with blocks of text only.BAD
Links Without Content
If you create links without a block of content around them, they will look like paid adverts. Most Internet users associate such links with spam and this will hurt your SEO even if the links are real. Don’t have random links to your website from another webpage. Always strive to have at least a little bit of content around all links.Fast Links
Search engines are expert when it comes to finding unnatural looking SEO activity. Building dozens of links in a single day followed by no activity looks suspicious. Links must always be created at a steadily improving rate. Build your links too fast and expect search engines to clamp down on you hard.Spam Comments
Some webmasters try and fool search engines by adding dozens of fake comments to various sites. There are a number of automated tools that specialise in posting spammy comments to different blogs with a link to your site contained within. As you might expect, Google and others can quickly spot this activity and they will penalise you when you’re caught.UGLY
Link Networks
This is a sophisticated method of trying to get linking building to work for you. Link networks appear to be a good idea in theory but in practice, it is very difficult to pull it off without being caught and punished. All Google needs to do is look at referring IP addresses to see which sites are using link networks. All sites involved in the network will be permanently banned when they are caught.Doorway Pages
This is the practice of redirecting users off your site. A 301 redirect is a much better idea as it is legal and good for SEO. Doorway pages are sneaky and catch visitors by surprise. As a result, you will be banned if caught using this black hat SEO tactic.The above are only some of the many SEO tactics that can be used to great effect along with others that should never be attempted. Black hat tactics may appear to work for a short time but eventually, you will be caught and your website will be punished.
