SEO, like many things in life, is a huge investment that takes a lot of effort and care to pull off effectively. As such, it can get really frustrating sometimes, and at certain points you just wish that there was a way around all the work required to get your site to rank properly. The thing is, there IS a workaround to all the hard work. Simple, cheap techniques collectively called "black hat SEO". What a grim way to call it, right? That's because if you care about your reputation, your site, and your business, you shouldn't engage in this type of SEO. Google heavily penalizes sites that use such techniques, and your site can even get banned.

One of the more common techniques is keyword stuffing. As the name implies, it involves cramming your page with keywords in the hope of ranking high for those particular keywords through keyword density. It looks very much like spam. You might think, "but spiders are just programs that can't read like humans do." Well, they can, especially Google's. In fact, if the spider sees a very high concentration of a certain keyword in one page it automatically becomes suspect. The great thing about Google's ability to detect keyword spam is copywriters are now forced to write naturally--which is actually much, much easier to do, and will appease both the human readers and the search robots alike. Don't worry too much about how often your keyword appears on your page, just write like you normally would.

The second common technique goes hand in hand with the first, called invisible text or cloaking. The technique simply involves using the same color for your spam text as the background color of the page, so human visitors won't see it. Again, Google will sniff you out easily anyway, so don't even bother.

Doorway pages is another black hat technique. These pages are made specifically for search engine robots, as when human users land on it they will be automatically redirected to the actual site. This is yet another way to cloak stuffed keywords, as black hat SEOs use these invisible pages as keyword dump sites. Again, Google and many other search engines can easily find these out now so it's not a wise idea to use these.

Link farms are probably one of the worst ideas as far as SEO is concerned. These are pages designed specifically to dump links in. The idea is that since Google places a high importance on the number of inbound links to a site, you can submit your site to several of these link farms and you automatically get hundreds of backlinks. Nowadays, Google not only looks at the number of backlinks but also the quality of those linking to you. Since link farms are devoid of content and REALLY look like spam, Google will heavily discredit sites that are linked to by such pages.

These are just some of the many techniques to avoid. There are many others, but they are easy to find because they look a lot like cheating. Note that there are several SEO companies who use black hat SEO. You'd want to avoid them because not only will they take your money, they would also ruin your business and reputation. They are easily identifiable: if their promises are too good to be true, they probably are. Ask your SEO about the techniques that he will use to optimize your site before giving them the job, to make sure they are using legal methods.

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