Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

Cloaking

When a search engine robot visits your site, it expects to see the same con-

tent that any normal human visitor would see.

Cloaking

is a method of identifying

robots when they visit your site and showing them special, custom-made pages that are

different from what human visitors see. This thwarts the search engines in their attempt

to deliver the most accurate search results to their users. In the vast universe of website

technology, there are sometimes valid reasons for showing different content to different

entities. Tricking the search engines to give you higher ranks than you deserve is not

one of them.

Duplicate content

Are you the kind of person who thinks, “If one aspirin works, why

not take two?” If so, you might be thinking that if one paragraph of keyword-rich

text will help your ranks, why not put it on every page in your site? Or worse, if one

website brings you sales, why not make a bunch of identical websites with different

names and get even more sales? The problem with this kind of thinking is that it

ignores the big headache it causes for searchers. If the search engines listed identical

content multiple times, it would destroy the diversity of their results, which would

destroy their usefulness to the searcher. So, if the search engines catch on to duplicate

content schemes, they’re likely to knock you down in the ranks.

Keyword stuffing

Adding a keyword list to the visible text on your page is not exactly

scintillating copy. We’re not talking about overly optimized text, which may come off as

pointless and dry. We’re talking about repeating the same word or words over and over

again so that your page looks like an industry-specific grocery list. At best, sites that do

this cause eyestrain for their visitors. At worst, they’re risking penalties from the search

engines. There’s a place for your keywords list: It’s called your meta keywords tag!

Invisible text

When we mentioned invisible text previously in this chapter, we meant

specific elements that are included within specific parameters in your site’s code and rec-

ognized by the search engines to be legitimate. We did

not

mean making a ton of key-

words invisible by making them the same color as the background. The search engines

caught on to this one a long time ago, and they’re not likely to let you get away with it.

SEO Is Not Brain Surgery

So many people feel intimidated when approaching SEO. They think its ultratechnical

or it requires a huge budget. Many people think SEO requires some sort of degree or a

lot of insider knowledge. But SEO doesn’t take any of that.

The only thing that is really necessary for SEO is the willingness to learn. So

here is our most special gift to you, an SEO mantra that you can adopt as your own:

I wonder why that’s happening.

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