Making your website more search engine-friendly is very important if you want to benefit from your online presence. The thing is that the vast majority of people use search engines to look for information. You can therefore expect to generate more traffic only when you persuade the search engines that your website deserves to be ranked high in their results pages for particular keywords.
Although SEO is supposed to help you make the most out of your online presence by helping you improve your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERP), this is not always the case. In fact, sometimes SEO can damage your website’s ranking rather than improving it and even get your website banned by search engines. The damage can be repaired but it is better to prevent it from happening in the first place. The importance of the basic knowledge of SEO therefore can’t be stressed enough.
If you don’t want SEO to damage your website’s ranking, you should strictly avoid the so-called black hat techniques. Examples include keyword stuffing, using hidden text, link spamming and similar methods which are intended to deceive the search engines and manipulate them into ranking your website higher in SERP. Search engines continuously change their algorithms to prevent being manipulated (Google changes algorithms virtually on a daily basis) because their success depends on providing relevant listings to queries of their users. If they fail to do that, they are risking losing their users to other search engines.
When discovering black hat techniques (and they sooner or later do), search engines always penalise websites that use manipulative and deceiving SEO methods either by reducing their rankings or removing them entirely from their indexes. In order words, your website can fall to the 100th page or be even erased completely from SERP. You are therefore highly recommended to avoid using any unethical SEO tactics that are disapproved by the search engines. For the very same reason, you are recommended to be very careful whom you entrust your SEO campaign.
Unfortunately, the use of unethical SEO techniques is not that rare even among those who call themselves specialists and promise to help you make the most out of your online presence. How to choose an SEO specialist who won’t jeopardise your website’s ranking and how to recognise providers who may cause more damage than good is discussed in our articles “Choosing an SEO Specialist” and “Beware of SEO Providers Who…”, respectively. Penalty recovery can be very expensive and time consuming, so take a few minutes to learn more about how to avoid wasting your money on SEO services that can worsen rather than improve your website’s search engine rankings.