Things to avoid while optimizing your site for Search Engines

Webmasters spend a lot of their time and money in optimizing their websites and blogs to get them ranked on the first page of search engine’s organic search results. On the flip side, search engines exist on the web with a goal to provide natural and veritable search results to the user. Search engines serve as a medium through which users can interact with the Internet, or in other words, search engines are doorways through which one can enter and browse the Internet. From finding virtual web addresses to locating keyword relevant links, search engines are used for an array of web-related purposes. Collectively receiving more than one billion search queries daily, Bing, Google, and Yahoo are the most visited search engines across the globe. 

As increasing number of people rely on search engines to guide them to their desired online location, search engines are equipping themselves to serve the online masses by trying to provide flawless search results. The major hindrance that prevents search engines from attaining their goal is the wide adoption of black hat SEO techniques. Black hat SEO techniques are adopted by webmasters so as to get their websites and web pages ranked on search engine results quickly. Cloaking, keyword stuffing, creating doorway pages, and participating in link schemes are some of the black hat SEO techniques.

Search engines are working rigorously to weed out websites optimized using illegitimate SEO techniques. Google, which is one of the leading search engines on the web, has been developing and updating its search algorithms so that they do not rank and index such websites. Google experts have been studying and analyzing the widely adopted black hat SEO techniques, so as to incorporate automated programs to restrict spamming activities. As a result, Google recently equipped its search bots with Panda and Penguin algorithmic updates.

These algorithmic updates help Googlebots to penalize websites that engage in spamming activities. So when you submit your website to Google, make sure your website complies with Google’s publisher guidelines and there is no occurrence of any spamming activities in your website.

Below I have suggested a few things to avoid while engaging website optimization for search engines:

• Do not integrate social media platforms just to publicize your blog or website. Post interesting keyword related blogs, articles, or images on your website so that they can be shared on social networking websites.

• Do not create doorway pages on your website, specifically to attract search engine crawlers. This is deemed to be a black hat SEO technique.

• Do not use rel="dofollow" attribute in the page meta-tags, as these attributes ask for search engines to transfer the link juice and page rank to all the links included in the web page.

• Do not participate in link schemes or get backlinks from backlink generating software or websites.

• Do not send automated program queries directly to Google, as this could prove to be detrimental to your website’s visibility on search results.

• Finally, do not engage in selling backlinks from your website to third-parties.