We are amazed at the amount of effort people spend trying to cheat or manipulate their search engine rankings. People seem to focus on the shortcuts to success and NOT on your website or the true value your content provides to your prospects.

In the spirit of educating marketers on best practices, we present this list of ten things you can do to sabotage your search engine marketing project in a “New York” second.

1. Invisible (ghost) text

You have kept a good secret! Your visitors may not have noticed it, but all search engine crawlers have been trained to be on the lookout for this obvious technique, which last came into vogue around 1997. Search engines may well remove all of its pages from its index due to deceptive practices.

And, if you’re feeling really frisky, you can make this technique even more effective if the invisible text has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the page it’s on.

2. Use of frames

Search engines are not “frame friendly”. Once they find an annoying frame, they either stop dead because the frame doesn’t give them anywhere else to go, or they place pages beyond the frames and direct people to that location, which won’t have the frames included. with that.

There’s really no need to use frames and try to justify it by believing it will improve the prospect’s experience.

If your prospects can’t find your site or find snippets of you, how much have you really helped them?

3. Why be fresh and original?

Why try to be unique, it’s too hard anyway? It sounds silly, but it happens quite often. If you find something of real interest on another site, simply burning a copy and placing your links at the top doesn’t make you a unique force on the web. And how many real shopping sites selling the exact same discounted products are enough for the average Web? In my book, the more sites you mirror, the less effective you will be.

4. Chubby web pages (obesity kills)

Sites with lots of graphics, animations, Flash and music pose a lot of disturbing elements to search engines. Not only can it confuse your prospects, who are looking for obvious information and links, but search engines may not feel that you are very relevant because they can’t be sure what to do with your website.

If you have a site made up solely of heavy graphics and multimedia, it will not only give you zero for search engines to index, but it can also aggravate any prospects running on a slower connection speed. In nothing else, at least, use ALT tags to explain images for text browsers, the hearing impaired, and search engines.

5. Redirects, redirects and more redirects

You may be using “redirects” within your web pages to track clicks for advertising and also to collect information about visitors to your site. Your web pages may be indexed, but they may not rank well at all. Search engines may not be able to see the correlation between your web pages because the redirect code often blocks its path, unlike the direct text link.

6. Long URLs

Dynamic (ever-changing) e-commerce and shopping websites that use parameters and their session IDs often manifest these tricky URLs very well.

If your website has long URLs peppered with question marks, percent signs, session IDs, and at least three parameters, you’re hurting your hopes of search engine superiority.

Long URLs don’t look very appealing to searchers, and site URLs contain multiple database calls.

Opening the path for the search crawler directly in your database can be a safe way to send it somewhere else.

7. Forgot your No Index tag and Robots.txt?

Have you created a plan to keep all those nasty search bots out? Do you have a robots.txt file living in the root of your site? This file contains the following:

User agent: *disallow/

Or does your web property have a meta tag?

Be very nice to your Webmaster. He or she may leave your company in the future and leave this little monster behind for you to find at the end of some needlessly expensive investigation into why the search engines don’t get along with your website.

If you’re using the special bot protocol, you don’t want to forget to remove them entirely if you’re going through a beta testing process.

8. Entry Pages

Entry pages (also known as jump pages and bridge pages) and anything that is created specifically for a search engine and contains nothing but valuable content or products for your potential customer is not an effective search marketing tool. .

If you don’t provide true content, search engines will find out and may penalize your entire site online. If you’ve gotten yourself down this hole, you probably need to go back to start with a new domain name.

9. Identical meta tags and titles

You cared about every single page of the web property while you were developing it, but you didn’t care much about each page being tagged (or categorized) that way.

Imagine walking into your public library where every book has the exact same title. What better way to tell a search bot to “take a walk” than to show it that all your content is exactly the same. Chances are, you’ll see fewer web pages indexed and much less traffic than you would otherwise.

Here is a quick checklist to consider for your Meta-Tags and Titles:

* Do they deliver a “call to action”?

* Do they use relevant keywords and phrases?

* Is your “Title” less than 80 characters?

* Do they accurately describe what the page is about?

* Are they consistent with the page?

10. Link networks

Found a service that offers to link to thousands of other Web sites today? Participating in these programs can effectively signal to search engines that you really don’t want their valuable traffic. The quality of these linked pages, as well as the overall “value” of their content to a human visitor, is very low.

Most search engines agree and can severely penalize accordingly. Sites that are flagged as spammers can be quickly informed that they need to find a new domain name and start over.

I advise you to take these lessons on “eMarketing Sabotage” for what they are, guidelines to help you operate your good eCommerce practice free and clear of the many pitfalls and mistakes of other marketers and improve your own level of success as a whole. with search engine strategies.

Soon, with a solid plan, some smart work, and a solid attention-to-detail approach, your web pages can rank high among today’s top search engine results.

Happy marketing!