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Today, if your business cannot be found on Google you may as well not exist. Therefore, ranking high in search engine results is paramount for most companies. There exists a myriad of resources offering advice in this regard, but not much guidance regarding what advice to not heed. Such advice is often referred to as black hat tactics.

Which search engine optimization tactics are bad ideas?

1. Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the practice of creating text content on a website solely to rank high for that word or phrase. Such a practice means inundating pages with words in either a nonsensical fashion, for example a page that simply repeats cheap Viagra a thousand times, or writing something that repeats a phase so often it is annoying to read.

Those offering bad SEO advice will, of course, not suggest that a business create obvious pages of only keywords that are visible to the public. Instead they may suggest matching the text color to the page background so upon visiting the page it appears to the viewer to be blank. The assumption is the visitor would then surf to other pages to eventually purchase.

For those consultants who do not find such obviously underhanded tactics a good idea, they may suggest targeting an extremely high percentage of times a certain phrase is repeated on web pages. This advice is delivered in a fashion such as the following:

Repeat the phrase cheap Viagra as much as possible on each page without making the information too annoying to read. Once complete, note the word count of the page and count the number of times the phrase you wish to target is repeated. If the percent of times the phrase is repeated is less than 15%, add more.

Although being aware of keyword percentages is a good idea, it is more important that content be relevant and useful to the visitor. As stated by Gabriella Sannino of Level343 in her article Are Keyword Density Percentages Killing Your Content? The 'talked about' density [for keywords] ranges from 2% to 9%, depending on whos doing the talking.

Although these tactics may work for a short time to improve ranking, annoying customers is no way to sell a product.

2. Code for ranking

Other advisers who understand the algorithms used to rank websites may also suggest that clients use title tag codes, h1 codes, bolding, and meta tags on pages excessively or exclusively. Although meta tags are no longer used to rank or categorize websites anymore, h1 coding, page titles, etc. are used to determine important information on each page and therefore relevancy to a searcher. Yet use of such HTML excessively on a website will also annoy visitors and could have very serious consequences to ones visibility on the web.

3. Any links from anywhere

When one website links to another, search engines use this as an indication the linked website is an authority on the subject. A person looking to boost the ranking of a website may suggest gathering any and all links to a companys website in order to trick search engines into an association of authority. Link farms are sometimes suggested to link simply for linking sake.

This is a very bad idea because not all links are weighed equally and links from some pages known for such tactics could negatively affect page ranking and diminish efforts to optimize a site for search.

Knowledge of the search engine algorithms does not guaranty good advice. Search engines goals, at their essence, are to surface relevant information from the authorities on a topic. An attempt to trick search engines into surfacing a website based only upon gaming the system may work for a short time, but with success comes attention. Once the spotlight is shinning on a site, its tactics become clear. If and when such an event happens, search engines will likely take action and when they do, the result may be a companys website not surfacing at all for any query.

Search engines have no obligation to list a website, and if the aforementioned tactics are used, the result could be disastrous to any company looking to earn business online.