What Is SEO Malpractice?

December 23, 2008 by dashaver

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. So an SEO would be a person or firm that works to get your website higher rankings in the search engines. This can have great value if yours is an ecommerce web site. Sometimes these firms charge quite a bit for their services.

What Do Search Engines Want?

Search engines have customers, namely people who are searching for things. Therefore the goal of the search engines is have relevant results for these searchers to bring them back next time. The more people who use a particular search engine the more advertising revenue it will earn. This is the reason search engines are so concerned about the quality of their search results.

What Do Web Site Owners Want?

This is in direct contradiction with web site owners who just want their web site to be the first one in the results regardless of how relevant it was to that particular search. A dishonest SEO, also called Black Hat SEO, will work in this direction to fool search engines. Dishonest methods might include pages with nothing but key words and no intelligible content or articles. Another common ploy is to create “doorway pages” which have no content but lead to other pages.

Getting Banished

These methods do nothing but get the website banned from the search engine results pages (SERPs). The fact that you hired some else to this for you does not make any difference, your web site is just as banned. You might as well do business in a closet now.

How Can You Spot Black Hat SEOs?

The ones to eliminate are the ones who make promises like we will guarantee top ten rankings in a week or so. That is impossible. Another may offer to list your web site with thousands of search engines. There are only a few that matter such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Here is a code of conduct for seos

http://www.bruceclay.com/web_ethics.htm

White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is being a team player, it is doing the best you can to promote your business without detracting from another. I am probably alone in this thinking the only thing to do is to write articles every day. This is the most work of all the methods but I think it works the best. Another thing I do is to submit a sitemap to Google. I don’t bother with any other form of search engine submission. Google also suggests having a lot of other high quality web sites linking to you. I think the best way to accomplish this is to have a lot of high quality content worthy of linking to. Google also likes web sites with a lot of content. White hat SEO realizes that in giving Google what they want for their business they will in turn get what they want for theirs. The only true victory is when both sides win.

Here are the Google Webmaster guild lines

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

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