The pressure to get your site top search engine rankings is intense. You know the higher you climb up the organic search results, the more business you bring in.

Unfortunately, a greater number of companies are outsourcing to search engine optimization (SEO) professionals or are growing their own SEO team in-house. The number of top rankings available hasn’t changed; there are just more companies vying for those slots. 

Spammy Situations

There are definite no-no’s when it comes to search engine spam. Let’s look at a few gross violations that if you get caught doing will not only get your site banned from the search engines but will also likely get an eye rolling from the spam police for using such lame "old school" tricks.

• Keyword stuffing. Overloading keywords in a web page is keyword stuffing (sometimes called keyword stacking). The keyword phrase you want your site ranked for organically must be in your web page. But using that phrase excessively in your meta tags, or web page copy, is spam. What’s excessive? If you’re repeating the phrase so many times that the text no longer makes sense to humans, or is annoyingly to read, that’s excessive. Think about your real audience—humans—and you should be able to write copy without crossing the line.
• Hidden text. Putting keywords anywhere in your web page so humans can’t read them but search engines can, is hidden text. Don’t worry, meta tags aren’t hidden text because if people view your source code they’ll see them. A pathetic, yet still used, example of hidden text is coding your keywords in the same color as the background color of your web page. White keywords on a white background scream new-search-engine-optimizer-who-doesn’t-have-a-clue. Search engine spiders can sniff out hidden text in graphic images and Cascading Styles Sheets too, so don’t try those sneaky ideas either.
• Tiny text. No, making the keywords on a web page super tiny won’t slip by the spam police. Sure, it’s visible. But if the text is too small for your web site visitors to see, it’s spam.

Okay, these might seem obvious. What about the not-so-obvious stuff?

Gray Area

The confusing part of search engine spam is that it’s open to interpretation. The search engines don’t publish a detailed, comprehensive "What Not To Do" list on their web sites.

And what constitutes spam also changes. Once an effective tactic gets abused by spammers it’s spam. For example, in the late 1990s redirects were often used as a design technique. An animated splash page might redirect to the home page once the animation finished. Seems harmless enough, right? However, porn site marketers became notorious for optimizing web pages for irrelevant keywords and then redirecting people to their sites. Unfortunately, some web sites with redirects used for design reasons became unfairly penalized by the search engines.

Here’s a current example of a gray area: artificial link popularity. One of the most important factors to landing high organic rankings is getting good link popularity. The more sites that link to yours, the better. Well, almost. Quality is key. Quantity matters too, but too many links of low quality could signal artificial link popularity to the spam police. Web rings and free-for-all link trade sites are examples of who not to link to or from because they aren’t typically relevant to your web site. You’ll get a bunch of inbound links immediately, but the sudden increase from nonrelated sites will raise a red flag to the search engines.

Linking to and from unrelated web sites might seem like an obvious artificial link popularity ploy. But, what if you found a way to post a link to your web site across thousands of guestbooks, forums, or blogs that were related to your site’s keyword theme? Spam again, especially if your site suddenly has 10,000 inbound links when your competitors all average 500 inbound links. That seems awfully spammy. The interesting thing is that if you participate in several forums or blogs and mention your site’s URL in a posting because it’s relevant to the topic, that won’t likely be classified as spam. That seems "natural." Really, it’s smart guerrilla marketing.

Although this definition might not be as clear-cut as you’d like, search engine spam is a method that is used to purely trick the search engines into giving a web page a higher ranking.

If what you’re thinking seems like an easy way to the top, be careful. It’s not that spam doesn’t work. It often does...temporarily. When your spammy trick is spotted, it could mean getting blacklisted by the search engines. Being in a top 100 position is better than not being in the search engines at all.

Spammers in Marketers’ Clothing

Enlisting the help of an SEO professional is a fine idea. Check out the pros who are writing articles for reputable web sites. Talk to search marketing speakers at industry conferences.

Just don’t hire a company that sends you email spam about its SEO services. Oh please, how good can a company be if it’s spamming you for your business? If they’ll spam you, they’ll probably put your site at risk by spamming their way to the top of organic search results too.

And don’t bother with automated submission services. You might have gotten the "we’ll submit your site to two billion search engines for $99" email spam. Most search engines crawl the Web and will find your web site anyway. To make sure the search engine spiders visit your site if it doesn’t seem they are, you could do a paid inclusion program (that’s another article), but you won’t need to worry about two billion search engines anyway. There are only a handful of search engines that matter.

If you want to hire an SEO firm or consultant, during the interview process, ask the representatives to describe their strategy. Run fast from people reluctant to talk about their process. It’s not true that they’d reveal all of their secrets. You need to understand their approach to SEO because your web site, and your business, will be in their hands.

Catherine Seda, author of the best-selling book Search Engine Advertising: Buying Your Way to the Top To Increase Sales, is the creator of the new revolutionary five-set CD-ROM course Search Marketing Mastery™ Pay-Per-Click: The 5-Step System for Attracting More Customers in 30 Days or Less.