SEO Negatives

The first is what are known as flash front pages. In essence, those websites you visit that have all those pretty movies and moving pictures that you have to sit through, often listening to music, before you can get to what the page is actually about, is "flash". No doubt it's very pretty sometimes, and other times it's just pretty annoying. However, if you're not already well known, where people will come to your site just because it's you, then you're probably killing yourself. There are few ways to optimize a site when its opening page is a flash page, since the main page is the one the search engines count on to tell them what the site is really about. Some sites come up with unique ways to try to get around it, but it's pretty much an albatross around your neck. There are companies that have figured out how to optimize Flash, but are you willing to spend $300 - $500 an hour for them to do it? Now, if you only have a small bit of flash on the site, then it's find, and could enhance the look of your page. Some sites have a little bit at the top, then content throughout the rest of the page, and that works out just fine.

The second is what's known as cloaking. In essence, this is an attempt to deceive the search engines into thinking that another page is the main page for your site, then directing it to other sites that have a hidden agenda. I'm not going to tell you ways you can do this. Instead, I'm going to say that if the search engines figure it out, and they eventually do, then your domain name will be unlisted, and you'll have to pay for another domain name. The big time online sales people don't care all that much, because they're in it for the money, the scam. We're not interested in promoting that sort of thing, or doing that sort of thing.

The third is known as hiding keywords. Basically, this says you make the color of your keywords the same as the color in your background, so that they can't be seen, and basically stuff as many derivations of your keywords in there as possible. As I said on the keywords page, having too many keywords in the text of your page offers you no benefit to begin with. Hiding them, if discovered by the search engines, could get your domain name banned.

The fourth and final one I'm going to mention is don't steal content from others. Plagiarism is big on the internet because there are so many websites, and often it's hard to tell whether someone has actually stolen content or just happened to use a phrase that's more common that believed. However, there are people who will steal full content from other sites and post it as theirs, and if one gets mad enough they will turn you in to your server host, and they could ban you, and get your domain unlisted. It's true that there are many sites that might contain the same content, but if you can write in your own style and incorporate much of what you learned into your own words, then you'll be fine. After all, how many sites on SEO do you think there are now?

Okay, only one more page to this tutorial, the finale, and it's time to basically wrap things.

If you want to jump around, here's the table of contents:

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