If you run your own company or you’ve been put in charge of a business website, then you’re going to encounter the term SEO Orange County sooner rather than later. It’s getting rarer these days to meet someone who’s in business in any capacity who’s never heard of the term, but there are still a few out there. Assuming you have some basic idea of what SEO is all about then you probably know that there are recognized “good” sorts of SEO, and getting attention for your website. There are also “bad” ways of getting that attention, known as black hat SEO. If you’re just getting started and you want to know what you should avoid in order not to get penalized by Google, pay attention to this.
Get-Rich-Quick SEO
If you’re part of an SEO company then you’re not going to be able to get away with doing black hat optimization, because it will get you and your company a bad reputation very quickly. If you’re a freelancer, though, you might be tempted to do some things that you’ve heard will enable you to skip over your competition to the top of the ranking list. These techniques take into account only the web search, and not the human experience, and there’s nothing more irritating to Google, which is all about making for better and more accurate search results.
Posting duplicate content is black hat SEO. This is where you steal content from other sites, which is essentially plagiarism, or you post the same content over and over. There’s also keyword stuffing, where you figure out what keywords are likely to help you rank, and then you try to use them on your pages as many times as possible. There’s also creating links to or from sites with content that isn’t relevant to yours, because of the popularity of that other site. None of these tactics will get you to the top of the Google rankings for very long, if at all. The Google algorithm has gotten intuitive enough that it can pick up on these practices very quickly, so you’re better off not going in these directions.
Instead, use white hat SEO as you step into this new arena. Have relevant content on your sites, and label your images. Use unique page titles and only complete sentences with proper grammar and spelling for your articles and blogs. That way you’ll be building a client base that trusts you, and you’ll stay in Google’s good graces as well.