What Are the Top Search Engine Placement Tricks?
First, we have to define trick:
- An act or procedure intended to achieve an end by deceptive or fraudulent means. See Synonyms at wile.
- A mischievous action; a prank.
- A stupid, disgraceful, or childish act or performance.
None of these definitions sound like a good thing to do right? Now that you agrees on what a trick is, here is a list of tricks that people have tried to use in the past, sometimes successfully, sometimes not:
- Portal Pages - the right way to do this is to have pages with good content on them, content will bring in traffic. Tricksters try to put up pages with gibberish, and this simply does not work. Also, make sure that a spider can find each of your pages, linking them to each other, as well as linking them to and from the homepage. Pages that just have gibberish on them may rank well for a very short time, but eventually can get you banned.
- Meta Refreshes - tricksters try to make one page that ranks well, and point visitors to another page quickly that they really want them to go to. The only right way to do this is to increase the time of the refresh to more than 30 seconds.
- Javascript Refreshes - this is pretty much bad, any way it is done.
- Same Color Text - the right way to do this trick is to have an image as a background that is similar to the color of your text. This allows you to add additional text without changing the appearance of your site. Tricksters try to use html code or javascript to make a colored background, but search engines are wise to this.
- Misleading Keywords - there is no right way to do this. You will be penalized if the keyword metatags do not match up with your actual content. Don't even try it. It may work for a short time, but for the amount of work you put into doing this trick, you are better off just making good content pages that will get consistent traffic for a long time.
- Mirror Sites - the right way is to buy different domain names and make sure that even if the content of a page is the same, the titles are different. It is a good idea to change the content at least a little bit too. Tricksters are lazy, and just copy websites over and over, which the search engines view as spam.lack of unique titles is the common penalization
- HTML Comments - html comments are used for commenting your html code. There is no proof that they work any longer as a good place to put additional keywords.
- Keyword Spamming - saying sex sex sex for example is what the tricksters tried, and for a while it worked. Now, you will not want your keyword or keyphrase to appear more than than 10% of the time, and a better keyword density would be around 6%. Each search engine uses different rules for this too, so what works perfectly for one search engine may not work as well for others. We recommend that you just write natural, and use keywords when you can.
- Link Farms - the right way is to find other high ranking sites ( top 20ish ) and exchange links with them. Tricksters try to make hundreds of sites with no content all linking to each other. You will get penalized if you link to a low ranking site now!
- Page Swapping - this is the current trick that may stop at any time. People make a page that ranks well for one term, usually a very popular one, they wait until they have quite a bit of traffic going to it from the search engines, and then replace the contents of that page with what they really want people to see.
- Copying Someone Else - it seems easy enough, find someone who is ranking high and steal their code. It may work, but more than likely it will backfire. It is better to have your own code and content. You could also be sued for infringing on someone else's copyright. They do not need to state © for it to be copy protected! If you didn't write it, it isn't yours!
- Cloaking - cloaking is one of the more technical ways to trick search engines. There are a few ways to do it, but the idea is basically the same: when a search engine comes they see one page, when a visitor comes they see a different one. This works, but it is usually costly and risky. If you are caught you could be banned from the search engines.
- Searching For Yourself - one way that search engines find new websites is when someone searches for them. They use the number of searches for "hotmail.com" for example as one of the factors in popularity. You can slightly inflate your own popularity by searching for yourself instead of typing in your domain in the address bar. For example, if you searched google for digitalcrunch.com, you would see this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=digitalcrunch.com&hl=en&lr=
Try your own website and see, or even make it a habit of typing your website into google when you want to visit it. Note that if you do this over and over from the same IP address, it will likely not help you at all, you'll need different IPs for each search.
Real content is and always will be what people really want, but if you are going to do tricks, at least know how to do them!