search engine optimisation

Peter Maycock

search engine marketing

Search Engine Marketing - Common Pitfalls & Bad Tactics

Search engine marketing as an industry has its fair share of con merchants, charlatans and snake oil vendors. If you want a robust, long term presence on the web, the job must be done properly.

Many people hear of the "tricks of the trade" and think that there is a fast-track route to the top - well there isn't - not if you want stay at the top.

Search Engine Marketing - Common Pitfalls

One of the most common mistakes is to have the text on a page set in a graphic. This allows the designer to specify fancy fonts and precise layout - but it doesn't give the search engine's spider any real text to index. The spider just sees there is a graphic there but cannot read the words embedded in it.

Another common mistake is to build the site solely in Flash. Without real text on your site, the spider just sees the Flash movie and is largely unaware of what that movie contains.

Search Engine Marketing - Bad Tactics

Lets begin with the single biggest scam on the web - using text that is the same colour as the background on a page - this is naivety at best - cheating at worst.

Once, the ideal way of giving content to the spiders whilst keeping a visually sexy design, this tactic has been so abused by people keyword "stuffing" the page, that it has become the number one way of cheating the way to the top.

But what people forget is that it's not just the spiders that have to be fooled, it is also your competitors. If you succeed in using this tactic and make it to the top you will be discovered and turned in by your competitors - all the major search engines have a facility for people to report such abuse - the search engine marketing industry is very competitive and you could be penalised - or even banned!

And last, but by no means least, the invisible pixel trick! This tactic involves placing single, transparent pixel images on the page and using them as an invisible link and often putting repetitive keywords in the alt description. I have seen pages with hundreds of these single pixels on them - but I've never seen them at the top for long!

Serious promotion of your pages can result in a massive amount of traffic to a website - using the above tactics doesn't pay in the long term. Click here and here to read what Google says about these tactics.

Click here to contact me now for more details on how I can help your company or organisation.