Pitfalls To Avoid In Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing practitioners need to be reminded every once in a while that there are ethical search engine marketing practices and there are non-ethical ones. Ethical methods in search engine marketing get the job done. Non-ethical methods, on the other hand, can get a website banned, not to mention lose credibility and business volume.

The easiest way to conduct a search engine marketing campaign is always to go the straight and narrow path – in other words, the ethical path. But not everyone wants to travel the straight and narrow road because the results sometimes take too long to materialise. And so, there are some search engine marketing practitioners who would rather go the crooked path to get the search rankings and results that they want.

Any search engine marketing consultant worth his or her salt would be painfully aware that the victories achieved in going the crooked path are short-lived. But not all consultants knowingly tread this crooked path; some stumble upon it purely by accident. In order to enjoy the fruits of the true victory in search engine marketing, a consultant must carefully avoid certain pitfalls along the path. These pitfalls are, namely: website cloaking, page stuffing and link farming.

Website cloaking. Website cloaking is any tactic that involves showing a version of a website’s pages to a search engine spider that is not what human readers would normally see when they view the page. Website cloaking in all its forms artificially boasts the search engine ranking of a website, and the only time it is acceptable is when the website needs to deploy cookies that spiders hate. Google greatly disapproves of this practice and bans websites that engage in it. One such high-profile company whose website got banned for cloaking was BMW.

Page stuffing. Search keywords are important in search engine marketing; these keywords do a lot in bringing the rankings up and the traffic in. However, there are right ways of putting keywords throughout the content of a website’s pages, and there are wrong ways of doing this. Stuffing a page with keywords – whether hidden in the HTML code, hidden under a graphic or constantly inserted in articles in a way that the article itself no longer flows naturally – is certainly the wrong way. Pages that are actually readable will be more valuable to readers than those that are keyword-stuffed.

Link farming. Search rankings are also determined by the number of websites linking back to a website. If website one has many websites linking back to it, what it tells the spiders of Google is that many websites think website one has relevance. Some marketers work their way through this by buying links or getting into a link farm. However, Google now examines the relevance of the websites that are linking back to a particular website, and thus link farming and link spamming now does more harm than good to a website.

There are right tactics and there are wrong tactics in search engine marketing. The right tactics get the job done and the results desired; the wrong tactics, on the other hand, can get a website banned. It is always important for search engine marketing practitioners to avoid the pitfalls that can end up costing the job.

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Pitfalls To Avoid In Search Engine Marketing

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