Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) For Your Real Estate Website Part 2

August 12, 2010

Black Hat Techniques To Avoid

Keyword Stuffing – this is deliberately planting extra instances of certain important keywords in your writing beyond what is warranted with what you’re expressing.  For instance, if your farm area was Toronto and you wanted to be ranked under searches for “Toronto real estate” a black hat method would be using the word “Toronto” an excessive and gratuitous number of times on each page in your writing (eg. more than 10 times).  Your readers will simply recognize this as poor, annoying writing.  

Another Keyword Stuffing technique is having areas on your page devoted to important keywords (eg. “Toronto real estate”) with no context that aren’t part of some descriptive writing.  So make sure any writing on your site with important keywords is either used for descriptive, informative purposes or used sparsely on your pages and always in the same spots as part of your branding consistency.

Invisible Text – this is where Keyword Stuffing is done on a larger scale.  Someone puts lots of instances of keywords on their site but hides all of them from the viewer by making the text color in these areas the same as the background color.

Doorway Pages – this is a page that isn’t indexed or referenced anywhere on the website and so visitors will never see it.  The reason visitors aren’t able to see it is the page is full of keywords and has no informative content.  The hope is a search engine’s bots will find this page loaded with the keywords the person wants to be ranked under and give major brownie ranking points to the site for having them.

Pages like this are major breaches of SEO rules and are increasingly able to be detected by their bots.  Once these pages are discovered by the search engine they will get your site booted indefinitely from rankings and you won’t get re-instated and given a second chance.

2. Grey Hat

These are SEO techniques that bend and nearly break search engines rules and regulations with the goal of getting better SEO sooner and with less effort and expense than if the rules were followed.  Since these techniques try to work within the rules yet find loopholes within those rules they fall into a grey area as they’re not good (white) but not technically bad (black).  Using grey hat SEO is not always unethical, but you may get into trouble and penalized in ranking if a search engine finds out about what you’re doing.

Filed under: SEO For Realtor Websites

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