I wrote this for work, but we're making it public, so I figured I'd share it here, too. I'm repurposing content!
Anyway, here's the quiz. Seven common SEO tactics -- do you know which are good, and which will get your site delisted, and why?
- Buy multiple domain names with different keywords and point them all to your site
- Add unique meta-tags to every page on your site
- Increase the keyword density of your pages to five percent, or twenty percent, or even fifty percent
- You can’t get away with simple white text on a white background, but use CSS to mask the color and do the same thing
- Detect the search engine ‘crawlers’ and show them different, keyword-rich versions of your flash or other pages
- Put ‘alt tags’ on all of your images and other content
- Edit your robots.txt file to include a command to “index=all; revisit=daily”
Answers are after the jump...
Don't read these until you've thought about the questions above!
- Multiple domains are okay, if you’ve set them up properly – I can check that for you! The key -- 301 redirects.
- You should use meta tags to help search engines understand your site. A good SEO campaign should include unique tags on every page. I can help write them for you!
- There may actually be a *best* keyword density number, but that would be one of the simplest things for Google to change in their next algorithm tweak. Don’t focus on a specific keyword density; try to write good content that will help your users, and make sure to use the keywords where they make sense.
- Bad idea. CSS won’t fool search engines long, and it certainly won’t fool a human checking up on the spam report your competitor filed against you last week.
- Commonly called ‘cloaking,’ is the one that got BMW. Clever idea, but it backfires spectacularly.
- Alt tags are useful for content that search engines can’t use otherwise, like images and even Flash movies.
- The robots.txt file is one of the great myths in SEO. It has very limited application – but in the right place, it can be very helpful. The example in this quiz is a joke; please don’t put that in your robots file.
Comments (1)
I was just researching SEO and the thought came, "I bet Mr. Dalton would know something on the subject!" Indeed, it would appear that you do. =) I may have missed it on your blog somewhere, but Dan also mentioned to me that including a blog in a website can give it a boost as well as being a neat way to interact with customers on the web. What are your thoughts?
Posted by Lisa Thompson | April 12, 2006 10:15 AM
Posted on April 12, 2006 10:15