Search engine optimization and online website promotion is incredibly important to creating a successful website. There are however pitfalls to avoid as you build your online network. Google does watch for certain behaviours and, if caught, an offending website can see a dramatic drop in its PageRank or even worse, it could be banned from the index altogether. In this article we’ll go through some of the major ones you’ll want to avoid.

There are lots of fish in the sea

When picking link partners, be cautious. Avoid link farms: sites with thousands of unrelated links but no content. Google will assign a value to any link to your site based on the quality of the site it’s coming from. Link farms are often banned altogether. Online directories are a different story. They are often focused in the links they carry, for example: Saskatoon small business; web designers; freelance graphic artists; etc. Google acknowledges these directories as different from the link farms.

Black Hat SEO

Search engine optimization used to be a black art with every web designer guessing what every search engine was ranking site on. The rules change regularly, but search engines have been more open in what they like to see and what they don’t. I’ll talk about the don’ts here.

* Using invisible links, i.e. making the text colour the same as the background.

* Keyword stuffing: it’s expected that you’ll emphasize your keywords in your website, but many go overboard and repeat all 50 keywords in every alt tag of each image, in the meta tag of each page, and anywhere else they can put extra words without them appearing on the screen.

* Automated backlink generation: there are a lot of programs and services available that will search the internet for buttons that say “submit link”, “add a link”, etc., and then automatically fill in your website’s address and description. This can produce a huge number of backlinks in a short period of time. Google will notice, but not in the good way.

* Leaving your site to die. Websites are organic entities and if you don’t look after them, they’ll slowly get older, outdated, and less useful to the general public. While this won't get you banned, it might as well, since your pagerank will drop slowly but surely.