Halloween is the time of year when people dress up as ghosts, ghouls, goblins and other hideous creatures of the night that roam the streets in search of candy and a good scare. In the SEO world, horrors hide behind every corner, pitfalls can cause your site to fall in the rankings or drop from the SERPs altogether. Halloween may only last one night but a penalty or ban from a search engine can affect you forever. Here some SEO problems an Organic Search Engine Optimization company can help you prevent this Halloween:
Hidden Text:
Hiding text from the visitor is done in many different ways. Common techniques include creating text colored to blend with the background, CSS “Z” positioning that places text “behind” an image — and therefore out of view of the visitor — and CSS absolute positioning that positions text far from the page center.
Broken Links/404 Errors:
When a broken link is found by a search engine spider it equates to a dead end. If the page returns a 404 error, the search engine will identify the page as non-existent as well as all teh pages that link to it. If the page linking to the 404 error remains on this list for too long or has too many links to 404 errors, it can have negative effect on the “Quality Score” of that page.
Cloaking:
Cloaking is a "black hat" SEO technique in which the content shown to the search engine spiders is different from what is seen by the user’s browser. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display a page when it would not otherwise be displayed.
Frequent Server Downtime:
When a website is offline the impact that it has on your SEO can be bigger than you think. If Google accesses your website while your website is down, Google could classify your site as being untrustworthy. The more often your site is offline, the more Google will think your site is not to be trusted, thus Google will position you lower in the listings.
Link Farms:
A link farm is any group of web sites that all link to every other site in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine. According to Google, a site that participates in a link farm may have its search rankings penalized.
Keyword Stuffing:
Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization technique. Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or the content. The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags. Keyword stuffing had been used in the past to obtain maximum search engine ranking and visibility for particular phrases. This method is completely outdated and adds no value to rankings today.
Optimizing for Too Many Keywords:
Keyword dilution is a very common SEO mistake. Each page of a website should target 1-3 keyword phrases max, and even less if the keyword phrases are extremely competitive. Targeting too many keywords on a page detracts from the overall topical relevance and reduces the importance of your most important keywords.
So to stay safe from all the ghoulish SEO mistakes that are awaiting you, besure you hire an Organic Search Engine Optimization specialist, like www.Crystone.net and let us help guide you through all the pitfalls that may lay ahead.
Subscribe