SEO Tips to Avoid Being Blacklisted by Google

It cannot be denied that Google is the biggest power in the free-for-all world called cyberspace. Being the prominent search engine company gives Google the clout to virtually ruin a website’s chance to succeed through search engine optimization. It’s not that Google can actually take down your site. However, it can delete your site from its database so it won’t come up in any search performed by any of its users. This is actually not such a big deal unless your income depends on always being at the top of search results. If that’s that case, then you’ve got a problem.

Worried now? Don’t panic. You can check on your site’s status by installing the Google toolbar. The toolbar will display your site’s page rank. When it’s totally gray, then you know you’ve been blacklisted. Here are some ways you can avoid that situation:
1. Avoid using hidden text on your site.

Some crafty website administrators put hidden text in their codes for different purposes. Some, sadly, do this to cheat—optimizing search engines by placing keywords that are invisible on the actual page. The thing is, search engines can still detect these keywords. When Google finds out you’re into this, expect to be booted out of its database.
2. Don’t cram your site with alt image tags.

Alt image tags are the texts that appear on a site when an image cannot be loaded or is blocked by a browser. Doing this is normally a legitimate activity in search engine optimization. However, there are those who abuse it by placing a considerable amount of keywords to trigger the search engines.
3. Don’t overuse keywords in meta tags.

Some people foolishly fill up their meta tags with repeated keywords thinking that this will help their pages rank better in search results. However, this doesn’t make sense because Google doesn’t rank pages according to meta tags. If you think doing this will help boost your page rank, think again. The most you could get out of this is Google penalizing you; or even worse, banning your site.
4. Don’t overuse keywords in your title tags either.

Although there are many foolish website owners who do this, many would agree that doing this is downright ridiculous. Why repeat the same word over and over again in a title? Apart from your website looking very unprofessional (and desperate), this does absolutely nothing to help you increase your page rank. You just need to mention your keyword once in your title tag and you’re set.

If you’re really smart and serious about your search engine optimization efforts, you won’t even think about doing any of these schemes. Not only would your efforts be futile, but your site will end up looking both ridiculous and annoying. And as if that weren’t bad enough, these SEO schemes will get your website banned by Google and other search engines. Just remember that your SEO efforts will not produce instant results. However, if you do it right, the results will be long term. There’s never a need to act to desperately as that will only lead to a lot of wasted effort.