It can be very easy to trip yourself up when it comes to SEO. This is part of the reason SEO companies exist. The system desperately needed someone with the time and concentration to examine the search engines and find out the invisible rules.

The one thing most businesses want to avoid when search engine optimising their site is creating search engine spam. The association with regular spam, or ‘the rubbish emails that everyone for years has had to filter out of their inbox’, makes search engine spam sound like a bad, bad thing. The lack of understanding of what qualifies as search engine spam makes it even scarier.

Search engine spam is different to regular spam. If regular spam is likened to its real-world namesake, search engine spam could be anything from dog food to succulent honey-roasted ham. In other words, it’s often difficult to see what search engine spam is and what is not. Keeping an eye out for cold roasted meats in general is not going to help you spot it.

Spam, for the search engines, is about manipulating a web page to boost its ranking artificially. When it comes to search engine spam, of course, only the search engines are in charge. They do occasionally provide some hints as to what is, and what is not, considered spam.

Google gives the definition of spam as anything that tries to deceive its search engine spiders. The examples they provide include ‘deceptive’ cloaking, doorway pages and hidden text. Microsoft adds to this list by citing keyword stuffing and false links. Yahoo!, not completely content to follow in Google’s footsteps, provides their own list of spammy techniques, but the message is essentially the same. The bottom line is that deception is frowned upon.

The techniques which the search engines seem to universally filter for include invisible text, keyword stuffing, unrelated keywords, use of minuscule text, duplicate sites and content, repeat submission and doorway pages. All of these techniques can happen completely innocently. There are many sites out there who have found themselves taken off the index without a clue as to what they’ve done, and in such a case getting the help of an expert is essential. Talk to us at SEO Consult if you have worries about your site’s content.

The search engines advise that anything you do to a site that you would not have done if search engines didn’t exist is inadvisable. This is pretty useless advice on the whole. There are plenty of things that good websites routinely do solely for search engines. A lot of these are done to ensure that the search engines are able to see everything a human viewer sees, such as the tags and codes put under image-based content. Truthfully, if you never did anything solely for a search engine, your site’s users would suffer.

This brings us to the best guideline: your users. When you optimise, the main thing to keep in mind is your site’s users. Most SEO professionals will tell you this. It is a great guideline, because it helps you to remember the purpose of your site. After all, no-one builds a site just for machines.

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