Keyword Techniques to Avoid
When adding your important image keywords to accompanying webpages, there are plenty of techniques that will benefit you, but equally there are plenty of other techniques that you should avoid. Try to trick or cheat the Search Engine and you are just hurting yourself. Don't get the idea that there is some secret and sneaky way to improve your results. The Search Engines read all of the internet, and have seen all these techniques used many times over. If it doesn't sound and look good to a person, chances are the Search Engine won't like it either. Key tricks NOT to try are listed below:
- Embedding important text in images: It is easy to forget that Search Engines don't understand images, so the text in them will be ignored. If you must use an image as the sole means of displaying text, don't omit the all-important 'alt' attribute in your image tag.
- Keyword stuffing: Don't be tempted to overload a tag or title with keywords as a list or group. Search Engines are designed to expect to see text organised in a recognisable human phrase. A list can easily be noticed and flagged accordingly.
- Keyword repetition: Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural just will not fool anyone, especially a Search Engine.
- An absence of text: Search engines have difficulty accessing JavaScript, text within images, video and Flash. Whilst a site using these techniques make appear avant-garde, too much use of this can be considered as 'Cloaking' - an attempt to hide accessible content.
- Copying text: Search engines would be happiest if there was no duplicate text on the internet. They like your content to be relevant but unique. It might seem a good idea to fill out your pages by copying a few paragraphs from Wikipedia or similar to increase your word-count, but that's a bad idea. The Search Engines know all about Wikipedia content, and will reduce your page rankings if you copy and paste lots of text without re-writing it.
- Irrelevant keywords: all keywords should be relevant to the rest of the page content, and vice versa. Relevant keywords reinforce the message that you are sending to a Search Engine. Irrelevant ones will do the opposite. They also waste space within tags with finite length, such as title and description.
- Hidden text: The technique of hiding text might fool your users, but it will certainly not fool a Search Engine, as they have been programmed to spot this and penalize you accordingly. Setting the text color to the background color, hiding text behind an image, using CSS to position text off the screen, setting the size to zero: all of these will be spotted.
- Hidden links: Some people will try and hide a link by linking to just one small character within a phrase, such as a hyphen or period. Don't do this - you will be penalized.
- Using the keyword tag: In the past, the 'keyword' meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords, so because of this abuse, the keywords meta tag is no longer given any credibility at all, and could even get your site listed as spam with some Search Engines.