Tricks to avoid

Bad site optimization suggestions (Tip 15)

Over the years, many tricks have been used to get a high search engine placement. As a lot of money is involved in getting and maintaining a high position in the search engine rankings there is no prospect of hitting on a new trick that hasn't been used before and is effectively blocked by the better search engines. Indeed using them might get the site blacklisted and not included in the listings at all.

Here are some examples of what to AVOID when writing a web page.

• Repeated use of keyword in the META keywords part of a page.
• Heavily repeated use of keyword in the text of a page
• Text which is hidden by having the background and text colors the same, or nearly the same
• Text that is displayed in a tiny font size
• Links from 'link farms' and 'link exchanges'
• Putting links to pages from an invisible or very small graphic image
• Using page frames, a search engine may not be able to work out which is the most important frame within the page
• Frequently re-submitting to Search Engines for inclusion
• Using your own names styles for headings rather than the standard H1,H2,H3...
• Using a complex set of nested HTML TABLEs in a page, the search engine will not know which is the significant part to scan.

• Improving Page load time (1)
• Keyword Specification (2)
• Robot Visits (3)
• Renaming a Page (4)
• Finding out about a Site (5)
• Keeping a Domain (6)
• Curtailing Spam (7)
• Resizable Pages (8)
• Readable Text (9)
• Alexa Data (10)
• Headers count (11)
• Using ALT text (12)
• Choosing a domain name (13)
• Using Optimizing tools (14)
• Optimization tricks to avoid (15)
• Getting Quality Links (16)

Site Position does not directly check a web page for any of these 'tricks' as the effects aren't apparent by looking at search engine listings directly. You can infer that a strongly downward moving web site in the Site Position Trend Graph display.