More and more businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of SEO to their online marketing strategies.

We asked CityWideSEO.com who are recognised and acknowledged experts in the field a few questions for our piece about getting the right SEO expert for your web site.

“SEO practices that really works for me, are more about whether the optimizations used are done in the right way, and that ends up meaning a lot more than just being an expert at SEO.”

Are There Right And Wrong Ways of Using SEO?

To this question, they answered, emphatically “Yes”.

There are right and wrong ways of optimizing a website and it is called the white hat and the black hat technique respectively.

If you use SEO wrongly, you are likely to incur the Google penalty. You may wake up one day to find that all the traffic you have laboured for has suddenly disappeared and that your once well visited website has gone quieter than a graveyard.

Search engines are very important tools in online marketing. Besides the major brands that may already be known, most other websites on the internet have to struggle to be seen. The average person relies on the results that search engines come up with.

The average internet user hardly goes past the first few pages of the search engines’ results page, whenever they use the search engine. This makes the first few pages, highly coveted.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the use of different strategies to increase the traffic to a website by obtaining a high ranking placement in search engine result pages (SERP).

To beat other websites to those traffic converting top spots on the SERPs, require a good understanding of how search engines can be optimized. While the techniques may look simple, some degree of expertise is needed.

SEO experts have dedicated their time to understanding how Google algorithms work. This has helped them to come up with a lot of solutions to help businesses and website owners get that much desired high ranking on SERPs in their different areas of expertise.

There are a lot of strategies employed by these experts ranging from the use of keywords to creating great content and back linking that have been known to provide positive results with regards to search engine rankings.

However, not all of these strategies are good as some practices have been known to solely aim at tricking the search engine. These unpopular strategies are referred to as Black Hat SEO.

What is Black Hat SEO?

CityWideSEO Experts: - Black Hat SEO are those techniques and strategies that are devised to trick the search engines. It is a desperate way of driving traffic to a website and not in line with the terms and conditions of search engines.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines  openly condemns Black Hat SEO by providing a list of tactics and strategies that are seen as Black Hat practice.

SEO practices that can get you penalized

Google, taking into consideration the plight of the internet user that needs to have access to top quality content, doesn’t take the issue of SEO malpractice lightly in any way.

If your website is caught engaging in any of the practices below, you will be penalized by Google.

Getting penalized by Google may mean that you will be taken off their index.

One of the most common Black Hat SEO is keyword stuffing. This occurs when there is an over usage of keywords on the website. The same word may be repeated over fifty times in an article. This is done to trick the search engine robot but once this is discovered, the website can be in trouble.

Other practices include unnatural anchor text, content scraping, doorway pages, buying links and duplicating content.

If you are looking to build a lasting business online, then you need to avoid the drama and setback that engaging in SEO sharp practices can cause.

Through constant algorithm updates, Google does a diligent job of fishing out erring websites in terms of low quality content, negative SEO practice and other reasons that do not agree with the SEO guidelines. If you start to think that you may never be caught, then bear in mind that Google updates its algorithms close to 600 times in a year and it blacklists nearly 10,000 sites every day.

Bottom-line is –you do not want to anger Google.

Anyone Can Fall Victim, No one is Above the Sanction

BMW’s website was taken off Google’s index in 2006 because they used doorway pages to drive traffic which was against the guidelines. Before you employ the services of any SEO expert, be certain that the firm or person has a good standing in the industry.

More recently, JC Penney was in the news for getting penalised due to a wrong strategy employed by the SEO Company in charge of their website. After enjoying unbelievably high rankings on SERPs for particular keywords like dress, rugs, beddings, Samsonite briefcase and several others for a few months, the NYTimes launched an investigation into the unbelievable popularity that the company had suddenly garnered online. The investigation revealed that they have 2015 paid links on several random websites that link back to the JC Penney page.

Going by the statistics that 33% of Google users may have visited the website based solely on the rankings, the question arose as to how much of the traffic converted to sales.

Google responded by demoting the website ranking. This was a slap on the wrist compared to having the page yanked off. The samsonite bag search that used to display the JC Penney website as the first result was changed with the result being number 70.

Talking through one of its reps, JC Penney claimed they didn’t know about the sharp practices.

JC Penney fired the SEO firm involved after the incidence.

Not long after, Overstock.com was also caught in a similar situation as JC Penney and their site also suffered a demotion.

So How Do You How to Avoid Getting Penalized?

We were told, to avoid getting penalized, the most important thing is to get a reputable SEO company that makes use of good SEO practices. Good SEO firms know better than to engage in such practices that may do more harm by hurting not only the sales but also the brand of their client.

Since there are so many of them, a good place to start is to check if the company has great recommendations from past clients. Who are their past clients and what do they have to say about the company.

What services are they offering and at what price.

Manage your expectations. Good SEO practice may start off slowly but in the long run, a lot of progress may be made. Many people that engage in Black Hat SEO techniques do it for immediate result purposes. Grow organically.

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