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Some learn by doing. This is an article about on-site optimization techniques that could provide painful lessons if implemented. A general overview of a few rudimentary things to avoid when performing on-site optimization.

At some level, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a game of one-upsmanship between the search engines and optimizers. At the end of the 90’s search engines paid a great deal of attention to META tags and what they had to say about a page. The ensuing cascade of META tag spam ended up causing search engines to devalue them significantly or ignore them completely. This article talks about other, similarly abused “optimization” techniques that may be painfully transparent to search engines and could result in penalization if a site is caught employing them.

Basic Keyword Spamming

It is telling that hardly anyone mentions META tags anymore, even for the purpose of keyword spamming. After having been so aggressively avoided by search engines for so many years, their usefulness to even hard core “black hat” SEOs is negligible. The sunset of META tag spam was the dawn of on-page keyword stuffing, an idea that still seems to carry a little weight these days. Relentlessly repeating a keyword, keyphrase, or series of keywords multiple times throughout the text of a page is still considered spamming, even if the keywords in question are wrapping in “legitimate” paragraphs.

The very old technique of “invisible text” (text the same color as the background), or very tiny text is now generally agreed to be obvious to most search engines. There is now argument as to whether similar effects accomplished via CSS are still effective. Modern stuffing techniques area little more refined these days. Instead of repeating the keyword over and over in a single, obvious invisible or tiny block, the keyword is liberally spaced throughout paragraphs and titles. The worst offenders use content scrapers to create a soup of text that, to a search engine spider, is supposed to appear like natural language. It will appear as anything but natural language to an actual human being.

Always develop the content of a site for those actual human beings, who want to easily read and understand your information. Even a simple technique like replacing pronouns or indefinite articles with specific keywords can come off as clumsy and poor writing to a human. Stuffing keywords into areas humans generally don′t see, such as “alt” tags on images and “title” tags on tables is also discouraged. The primary use for these tags is for accessibility. In other words, they aide the disabled, using a screen-reader program for example, to gain information about the page that others would not necessarily need. Search engines have devalued text in these areas for optimization purposes, though at one time it was thought they could be useful, and perhaps, were.

Linking Issues

A few general notes specifically regarding internal linking issues, since this applies primarily to on-page efforts. Avoid broken links. Whether the page was moved temporarily or had been permanently deleted, deal with the issue as quickly as possible. Systemic broken links can have an effect on a sites overall ranking if they remain for extended periods of time. Cleaning up broken links is simply good practice, beyond the possible SEO benefits. If a page has moved, add a 301 redirect to handle the issue. 301 redirects are primarily to handle incoming external links to a page from sites over which the webmaster doesn’t have control. Update the internal links to handle the new location directly.

Duplicate Content

There is agreement that a duplicate content “penalty″ exists in Google, though to what extent it penalizes sites is up for debate. Many feel the “penalty″ is merely a devaluation of the duplicate page itself. Google decides what is the better of the 2 (or more) versions of the “duplicate” page and, when searched, provides that page while relegating the rest to supplemental results or not displaying them at all. Others contend there can be a stronger penalty that effects the site as a whole. Duplicate content is an issue that directly effects articles such as this. Publishing them on your website is meant to build content, but will it do any good if Google merely considers it a duplicate? Some believe there’s a magical threshold percentage Google uses when determining how similar two pages are. A good rule is to make sure the content placed around the article, the navigation, layout, etc., is as unique as possible. Also, provide unique titles and meta tags for the articles to further differentiate it from others like it.

Conclusions

The issues covered here can be the result of a deliberate spamming campaign or an accident of attempting to perform legitimate optimization. Google repeats their mantra that designers should build sites for people and not for spiders whenever pressed for information about their algorithms. This is a good rule to follow when avoiding spamming techniques, as many of them create sites that cause a bad user experience for regular people, no matter how good they may appear to a spider.

About the Author:

Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for ApolloHosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers.

Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support.

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