Beware of Black Hat Marketing...

Successful SEO is pretty straight-forward; follow the guidelines that are set by the industry leaders and your site will gain in its ranking. But like anything else in life, getting to the top faster, getting rich quicker is very alluring and you need to be very careful what techniques you employ...and realize that you could innocently fall for some dirty little tricks called Black Hat Marketing. These underhanded techniques aren't illegal, but they are highly unethical and search engines recognize them really very quickly...and the penalties could kill your Internet presence altogether!

So here's a quick look at the common tricks of the trade:

Hidden content: Hidden or invisible text is basically lists of keywords on a website in the color white (or the background color) so that they cannot be seen on the page. By using invisible text, it is possible to feed through lots of rich content to search engines and users.

Keyword stuffing: This is an old-school tactics and is essentially repeating a keyword or phrase, excessively throughout your page, meta tags, alt, titles, links and more. This is easily recognized by the search engine cops!!!

Doorway (gateway) pages: Doorway or Gateway pages are pages designed for search engines and not for the end user. These pages pages that are little more than invisible pages that are only seen by search engine spiders and are used to increase SEO ranks.

Link Farming: A link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group - whether they are relevant to your product/service or not; simply put, web site spamming. Link farms can be created by hand, but most are created through automated programs and paid services. Since search engines rank based on relevancy, this is an easily detected form of cheating.

Search Engine Optimization is not just about following guidelines, its about creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to search engine spiders. If you are ever in doubt, consult a professional search engine optimizer.