While good SEO boosts site traffic, not all tactics used these days are above-board. Some, designed to "trick" search engines, are not only bad business: they can get your site banned. And that's no treat.

To make sure you're operating with the good guys, it's best to avoid using questionable tactics. Here are six "black hat" techniques that Dharmesh Shah, cofounder of HubSpot, recently suggested you avoid at all cost:

1. Link Farms. A group of Web sites is created for the primary purpose of delivering a high number of links to a given Web site.
2. Automated Content Generation/Duplication. To get search engine spiders to index more pages from them, some sites auto-generate content or scrape Web content from other sites.
3. Keyword Stuffing. This involves over-populating certain portions of a Web page with repeated occurrences of a given keyword.
4. Cloaking. This practice involves delivering different Web site content to the search engine spiders than is delivered to users.
5. Hidden Text. This technique "hides" text on the Web page, making it invisible to humans but indexed by search spiders.
6. Doorway/Gateway Pages. This practice involves getting a given page to rank well in the search engines, but then redirecting human users to a different page.

The Point: Don't try to outsmart the search engines: you might just get zapped. Working with them, however, should pay off with increased traffic in the long term.

Source: MarketingProfs. Click here to learn more.

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