by Jonathan Marshall I read a great blog this morning about bad SEO, and what Google does when they catch culprits of bad SEO strategies. Every day we deal with clients that have experienced bad SEO from amateur marketing companies and thus are hesitant to initially trust our SEO expertise. There are so many bad SEO strategies that "SEO experts" try to implement these days, and they can completely destroy your website, and ultimately your business. These blogs are great because the consumer needs to be informed about what they are getting involved in, and if more SEO experts just explained their strategies up front like we do, I think clients would feel much more comfortable.

San Diego search engine optimization training is one of the services that we provide. I don't think I could have written the blog better myself, great job to Julie Kent of Search Engine Journal. What good is a site if no one can find it? That’s one of the basic premises behind search engine optimization, or as it is commonly called, SEO. Websites that rank higher in search engine results pages get far more hits than those sites buried several pages back. So ever since the dawn of search engines, clever webmasters have been tinkering away at finding the best ways to get their sites ranked higher, and in turn increase its traffic and visibility. It’s a race to the top, and as in any kind of competition there are things you can do to boost your chances of “winning”. Some, however, are more dangerous than others. There are some very basic things that everyone should do to their sites to optimize them to at least a bare minimum level. That would include such things as making sure you have meta tags for descriptions and keywords, different title tags for each page of your site, and alt tags for all images on your site.

Hidden Text is a huge no-no. You as a human might not be able to see the white text on a white background, but you can bet that the bots can and you will get penalized for it. Think about it: bots are automated and they cannot “see” a page as we humans would, therefore they are reliant upon the source code of your site. Text that is the same color as the background sets off alarm bells. It’s not a clever way to stuff your site with extra keywords. It’s also something that you really want to watch out for. A site with less than adequate security can easily be exploited and injected with tons of spammy hidden text, so it’s a good thing to regularly check your logs and source code to be on the lookout for these things. Google doesn’t care if someone else did it to you – all they know is that it’s there, it’s bad, and you will punished for your ignorance