In the early days of search engine ranking, many people thought they could cheat the system. They knew that keywords were important, so they designed websites that were so keyword-dense that they made little actual sense to the human reader. More so, they thought that placing every word related to the term that they were hoping to index for was just as important. This is simply not the case.
Search engines see websites like this as nothing more than spam and they keep it from getting any sort of real ranking in the Internet’s search engines ranking pages. If you pack your content full of keywords, your website may even be degraded in these term rankings rather than increased.
Another common method that website owners tried to pull over the eyes of the search engines was their method of putting tons of links on other websites. Called “link farms,” these websites hoped that all of these extra links pointing into a website would mean that the website was valuable. Usually, these websites contained little to no real information, and in time, they were a waste of space. Google and others warned website owners that using such services would cause them to be dropped in their rankings.
Still another way that people tried to one-up the search engines was through the use of generated or fake traffic. The website owners would pay people to visit websites and to click ads, which today is a sure-fire way to get booted out of ad programs where you can earn money.
So, what does all of this mean to you? In short, it means that you need to commit to designing a website that is effective, useful, unique, and designed for the reader rather than for the search engines. When you put all of these factors together, the end result is promising.
