If you’re struggling in the rankings and are losing business as a result, you may well be tempted over towards the dark side. But be warned, Google won’t often be fooled, so quick fixes to fundamental problems will often only exacerbate the situation. But if you’re not familiar with black hat techniques there’s a chance you could be falling into this trap by accident, so here are a few of the main pitfalls to avoid.

Keyword Stuffing

A cardinal sin for any copywriter or website. Keyword stuffing was all the rage in the not too distant past; in fact even up until a few years ago it was still reasonably common practice, despite search engines clamping down on it severely. Today though it is very much frowned upon. Copy that has been filled with keywords is difficult for visitors to read and more often than not the search engines will punish your site accordingly.

You should be safe with a keyword density of around 5%, but don’t become obsessed by their frequency. As long as they are included in the onsite content and behind the scenes HTML, you should have enough to gain the search engines’ attention.

Hidden Text

If you don’t want to ruin the visible content by filling it with keywords you might be tempted to sneak in some invisible text to fulfil the same person. Don’t! This is sometimes referred to as white text, or hidden text, but essentially it refers to any copy present on a page but can’t be read.

By having the font colour the same as the background, the copy, for all intents and purposes, is invisible. This is a major black hat faux pas and will almost certainly be punished with the sophisticated site crawlers that search engines now employ. Whilst this too was fairly common in the past, don’t be tempted to bring it into the present. It’s not new and it certainly isn’t clever.

Doorway Pages

In an effort to gain additional traffic to your website you might also consider setting up a secondary, often highly simplistic, site with the sole intention of pushing visitors to your primary site. Because this additional platform has no obvious affiliation with your original site, you may choose to optimise it using more risque black hat techniques, targeting certain phrases that will gain traffic.

This is certainly an underhanded way of gaining visitors, one which most people landing on your site may not be too happy about. Additionally if search engines uncover that you’re hosting both, you may well suffer a dip in rankings or expulsion from their listings entirely.

Cloaking

As with doorway pages, cloaking is a way of trying to fool the search engine about some of the content on your website. This is pretty much impossible to do ‘by accident’ so it is often held in very low regard, despite the apparent ingenuity involved. Essentially a cloaking site will be able to identify when a search engine spider is crawling a site and provide an alternative version of the site.

Admittedly this is often done to cover up something illicit, so it is unlikely that you’d ever even consider it. But cloaking can also be used for doorway pages, and is fairly regularly, to ensure that only the content you want to be indexed is ever seen by search engine crawlers. But as this is a clear violation of the rules set out by the leading search engines, the risks far outweigh any potential gains.

Implement Suggested Changes

Finally, if you’ve gained some SEO advice, make sure you implement the changes. It sounds simple, but search engine marketing professionals have experience in helping sites move up the rankings. It can be frustrating when this doesn’t happen immediately, but keep the faith and keep making those changes. If nothing else, it will at least give you reason enough to go and seek other SEO advice or implement changes of your own.

Depending on the current state of your site, SEO can take some time and does require a modicum of patience. Even if you hire a professional SEO agency, they will need to analyse your site, work out where it’s failing, highlight key terms and then go about implementing it all. Search engines won’t index everything immediately and as a result, your rankings may only fractionally fluctuate. But don’t lose patience, get the advice you need and certainly don’t try any of the black hat techniques explained above, it really isn’t worth the risk.

Stephen Logan works as a Copywriter for leading Hampshire-based SEO Agency Impact Media. They offer a full range of search marketing solutions including expert SEO services.

Unlike the far broader techniques of general search engine optimisation, local search allows you to filter out much of the wider competition and appear for pre-defined areas. I say pre-defined, because it is entirely up to you how you choose to optimise your website and how wide your want the sphere of influence should be.

Geo tagging is one of the newest and most innovative ways for modern websites to optimise for localised search. Rather than leaving a visible imprint on the site itself, geo tagging allows you to implement global positioning coordinates within your HTML code. So when a search engine spider crawls your pages, it will know exactly where it is that you’re based and will help you rank higher in searches specific to your area.

Better still you can actually adjust these coordinates across the various pages of your website. Therefore if you’ve got offices at different locations throughout the country, you can adapt the pages that are specific to them to reflect this. Simple, but extremely clever.

To get started though, you might just want to tweak the content on your website. This is easy enough to do, simply add phrases like ‘London-based’ or ‘located in Central London’, will give your pages a clear locality and will influence search engines to feature your business for searches in that area. Don’t interrupt the flow of your copy though, only integrate terms where it will either blend in or compliment existing text.

A simple way of getting your location found by the search engine spiders is simply by including your address on each page. Contact details help customers find you quickly and easily, so will be a major benefit to the usability of your site, as well as optimising for local search.

Going down a slightly more traditional route, one that has been used for offline businesses for years, you could sign yourself up to Internet directories. This will help you gain additional keyword strength, provide a vital link back to the site and, yes, show search engines where you’re located.

So if you’ve invested time in optimising your site for local search, just what are the benefits? Well, first and foremost it could well provide you with a new stream of traffic to the site. But more importantly than this, the visitors will be looking for the services you provide in your area, therefore if you are ranking well for the associated key term, you could well find yourself improving your customer conversion rate.

With the Internet being such a competitive marketplace it is essential that any online business performs exhaustive SEO; local search is one element of this. Whilst SEO will help you rank for certain key words or phrases, local search will narrow this down further, integrating the SEO keyword work but for a specific location.

By narrowing your focus, you also eliminate much of the competition. Whilst you may have dozens, even hundreds of direct competitors, you can bi-pass most of these for those searching in your location. With consumers looking for local services more and more, you could be well placed to capitalise on this trend by optimising for local search.

Stephen Logan works as a Copywriter for leading Hampshire-based SEO Agency Impact Media. They offer a full range of search marketing solutions including expert Local Search services.

Google’s Matt Cutts had this to say

“The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

Part of the revision is said to address the growing implications of social networks on search results. Supposedly it is also faster. Come claim twice as fast. I personally never really had an issue with Google’s speed. I suspect speed matters more to Google themselves as more efficient typically means less hardware required. Less hardware means less expense in capital as well as operation, administration, etc. down the line. That means more money is Google’s pockets. So I could see how they would want that…