Working with Google Guidelines - What NOT to do

Today in this highly competitive internet marketing industry, internet marketing professionals are trying to promote their sites as quickly as possible in order to capitalise on the huge number of potential customers using search engines as their doorway to specific products and services.

Google continues to be the world’s favourite search engine with an estimated 55% of people starting their web browsing through it’s search page. For this reason, search engine marketers are targeting Google as the platform on which to have their websites listed in the top results.

Google’s exact ranking criteria are unknown to all but a small selection of Google engineers. Search engine marketers therefore use a selection of tried and tested techniques to help websites rank in the top ten of Google’s search results. Although no search engine professional can know all of the techniques to help a website rank highly, they will know about the techniques and pitfalls which can dsmaged and restrict the rankings of a website.

Below are some of the activities that should be avoided if you are to stay within Google guidelines

Keyword Stuffing

Refrain from stuffing in keywords to you site’s Title, Description, Keywords, Content Body, Alt Tags etc. You may feel that plugging in additional keywords might aid you in your search engine rankings, but in reality, it does the opposite with sites using this method being penalised and banished from the search results.

Hidden Text

Many webmasters, in an attempt to add more relevant keywords to their website’s copy, try to hide text within their content pages; This is usually done by merging the font color of the text with the background colour of the page. Although not visible to the site’s users, search engines can see it and will penalise for it!

Link Farms

Avoid linking to sites that interlink with each other for the sole purpose of increasing their link popularity, trying to manipulate their ranks in Google. Linking with link farms is a sure way to ruin your website’s trust factor resulting in a massive fall in search engine rankings and in some cases even banning from the Google index.

Cloaking

Cloaking is defined as serving a normal page to the users whilst serving an optimised version of the same page to the search engines. Although this method can help you to rank highly for a short period of time, the user experience is sacrificed and to Google that is unacceptable. This is a serious violation of search engine guidelines and should be avoided at every cost.

Fluid Creativity has a Search engine Marketing team that can help you rank well using what are considered 'White Hat' tactics which meet with Search Engine Guidelines.

Contact us today to discuss our internet marketing services