Search engines confuse us all with their loose definitions of what they consider to be spam. Most ’spammy’ techniques can also be used completely innocently. Despite the talk that floats around the SEO community, there are very few areas that are simply black or white.

It is near impossible to optimise your site without doing something you wouldn’t do if search engines didn’t exist. Many of the things done in the course of optimising your site are intended to make it easier for the right user to find the site in the search engine. This means making everything about your site as clear as possible to the search engines. It’s a very simplified view of what you really should do, which is work for your site’s users, rather than the search engines.

This makes it incredibly easy to trip up when you optimise your site. To the absolute newcomer, SEO seems all about keyword placement and density. This is the area in which most sites fall into error, and we’re all familiar with sad cases of innocent businesses coming across as spammy due to bad SEO.

It is possible to get your site into trouble with external factors. A lot of businesses don’t get this far because they have already wrecked their site’s ranking with internal factors.

The first thing to be optimised on most sites is content. This is because it’s generally the easiest thing to access. When optimising your content, watch out for anything that isn’t aimed at your viewer. Such things as tiny text containing keywords and invisible text are intended for the benefit of search engine spiders, and can get you penalised. There are areas in which these techniques are permissible. For instance, if you have image-based content, describing it in text hidden from human viewers can be the only way to reveal it to search engines. Such steps have to be taken very carefully, and it can be very helpful to seek professional advice when using borderline-permissible techniques.

Although your site’s viewable content is the most obvious place to watch out for things that could be perceived as spam, there are other areas to watch out for.

Meta spam comes from the changes you make to your Meta data. Meta data is data about data. When it comes to your site, your Meta data is the information you provide to describe the site’s resources. SEO plays with Meta data in some ways, tweaking it so that it is focussed more accurately on your SEO strategy. Tweaking this data too much, or deliberately mis-representing within it, can trigger the spam filter in a search engine’s spider.

Some of the areas people commonly place spam in their Meta data include their alt tags, header tags and title tags. In fact, just about anywhere in your Meta data can be spammed. Just like content spam, Meta spam can come out of overuse of SEO techniques.

The very fine line between a well-optimised site and spam is one of the reasons it’s a good idea to hire an expert for your search engine optimisation. Talk to us at SEO Consult about avoiding spam on your site. When you optimise, remember that it takes a light touch. Not only will the search engines react better to this approach, your site’s users will as well.

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