In this article we will discuss 8 things that harm a High Search engine Ranking. The advice in this article should help site owners attain better rankings for the sites they are promoting. In other articles we will look at other factors that may affect your ranking and also at more factors that may actually damage your ranking.

1) Overuse of keywords aka Keyword stuffing
Having your keywords appear too many times on the page is known as keyword stuffing and it will damage your ranking. The amount of times that a keyword appears is known as keyword density and it is expressed as a percentage. There are online tools for checking keyword density - you should be aiming for around 5% density, anything over 10% is running the risk of being classified as stuffing.

2) Lack of Focus / Dilution of keywords
If you are optimizing your site for a wide range of keywords or key phrases then you need to be careful that a) You group your keywords and phrases together on related themes and b)You do not try and cram too many keywords and phrases on the same page. As a rule of thumb you should have one primary y keyword or phrase and two or three secondary keywords or phrases per page. Any more than this and you run the risk of dilution.

3) Using tiny images as links
Whilst it is perfectly acceptable to use images as links to or within the site these must be of a reasonable (visible to a human) size. Having a series of 1 pixel images with hyperlinks to pages is not a good way to boost a sites internal linking - it does not look natural and search engines will detect, and penalize, this.

4) Cross-linking a group of sites
This is the practice of using a group of sites (normally owned / operated by the same person) to link to each other. So A links to B which links to C which links to D, B links back to A, C and D, etc ( these link groups are normally more complicated than this example and can involve hundreds of sites). It is recognized by the search engines and will be penalized as bad linking.

5) Outbound links to bad site or link farms
In a similar way that inbound links from bad sites / link farms can damage your search engine ranking so can outbound links. You need to check who you are linking to - pay particular attention if you offer visitors a chance to submit links etc on your site as you are not fully in control of the quality of these links.

6) Duplicate content
If you repeat the same content across your site you will be penalized. To a lesser extent this is also true of content hat is duplicated across sites - another rule of thumb is that the more unique your content is the more the search engines like it. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule - notably sites such as article directories can still do well even if all they have is duplicate content.

7) Search engine Specific Pages ( Doorway pages)
Whilst it is acceptable to tailor the content and optimization techniques employed to a specific search engine it is not acceptable to produce pages that have no purpose other than to provide results that search engine spiders will like. These pages, known as doorway pages, often contain no user readable data (and often simply re-direct to a more user friendly page). Producing doorway pages that aim to trick the search engines will, in all likelihood, get you banned from the very search engines you are trying to get into.

8) Cloaking
Cloaking is a variation of doorway pages that use various techniques to determine if a page is being accessed by a spider or by a human visitor and present different results to each. The same principles apply as do to doorway page s- i.e. do not do it ! (what is acceptable is to detect browser types etc and deliver content relevant to that browser e.g. a pc based browser may be different from a WAP browser)

We hope this tips prove useful to your online marketing efforts, please look out for more of our articles on this and other related subjects.