Before going any further in to SEO I’m going to go through the techniques which you should avoid. These techniques are considered black hat (unethical SEO techniques) and will usually result in your site being removed from the search engine listings after a small boom in ranking. These techniques are used by a number of web companies on short term contracts.

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<li>Keyword Stuffing/Spamming: This might not get your site kick off the search engine but will decrease your ranking this techniques involves repeat your keyword over and over with the site. To avoid this place your keywords within a good context this will disperse your keyword over many lines.</li>

<li>Doorway Pages: These are page invisible to user but not to the search engine containing content with keywords in. If the pages aren’t visible to your user group they shouldn’t be their.</li>

<li>Invisible Text: This is the art of have a background color with text of the same color on it “pressing control A” on your web page will establish if this technique is being used. </li>

<li>Tiny Text: yep you guessed it really small text containing key word hidden within the site.</li>

<li>Link Farming: developed in the late 90’swere by a collective of web site link to each other on ever page of the site thus trick the browser in to thinking that the collective is one site.<li>

<li>Cloaking: This is Doorway technique were the site tricks the Search engine in to go to a IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP not relevant to the site. </li>
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These are 4 of the main forms of black hat SEO, others include hidden links, domain spamming, mini/micro sites, page swapping (bait and switch). I suggest read up more on these techniques if you are going to do SEO on your own if you do outsource your search engine optimisation then i would strongly advise it to be on a a 12 month contract. his is due to the fact Black hat SEO can not be easily maintained over such a long period of time undetected. Next week I am going to go in-depth on how a search engine indexes pages.

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