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SEO Practices to Avoid

You have spent hundreds, if not, thousands of dollars to achieve the perfect website for your company only to discover that no one can find you on Google. You have spent most of your budget on your beautiful new site but realize it must be optimized in order for you to rank on Google. So, you hire the cheapest SEO Company you can find and after several months discover an even greater problem, you have been BBG'd - Banned by Google!

In the best case, a blotched SEO job will cost you a search engine listing. In the worst case it will get you banned from Google. If search engine referrals are your primary source of web traffic, you may as well pull your site off the server, and save yourself some money. It takes approximately 1 year to get your website off Google's blocked list.

Be alarmed if your SEO Company advocates using some of the methods detailed below:

• Cloaking
  "Cloaking" refers to designing your web site so search engines and visitors see different versions of the same page. You deceive visitors and search engines but not for long. Most search engines have smart mechanisms in place to detect and blacklist cloaked websites. Your temporarily high ranking won't last.
  
  
• Font Matching or Keyword Stuffing
  Trying to hide keywords by making the background color the same as the font color, (Font Matching) or by using an excess of repeated keywords in the meta tags (Keyword Stuffing) is another effective way to get your site banned.
  
  Likewise, adding keywords in a really tiny font at the bottom of your web page is a trick most search engines have caught up with and are likely to detect.
  
  
• Title Stacking
  Don't try to add extra <title> tags for more keywords. This cousin of keyword stuffing is called title stacking, and it won't win you any favors with search engines.

How to find out if your website has really been banned?

The easiest way to find out if your web site has been removed from a search engine's index is to enter the URL of your website in the search field. Since Google is synonymous with search, typing your website's URL in its search field bar will show you most of the pages that Google has indexed for this domain. If this doesn't produce any results, try searching for some text, such as an address, phone number, or any other information that is unique to your website. Try searching for other short pieces of title text. If Google still doesn't display any results, then it probably means your website has been removed from its index.