This is a guest post by Jessica Sanders, who is an avid small business writer touching on topics that range from social media to business management. She is a professional blogger and web content writer for ResourceNation.com.
You have a website or a blog for your small business. This supplements your other social network presences, but also acts as a space to utilize your marketing campaign.  You’re hiring out your SEO marketing services, you’re promoting the campaign, and writing about it all the while using your website as a vehicle to move it forward and make it successful.


Unfortunately, no matter how brilliant your marketing campaign is, the website mistake you’re potentially making will stop you before you can start. What is this mistake? Over-optimization.

Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO involves paying for inbound links, stuffing your content to gain better search results, and much more. Although this is considered to many as unethical, many companies still employ these techniques.

With a budget to spend, a team of marketing professionals, and an expensive marketing campaign, it’s easy to cheat the system. In the end, though your rankings may be high, you present little value to your readers, customers and those truly interested in what you have to offer.

So, what are some black hat methods?

• Keyword stuffing – Over using keywords in the meta tags or content.

• Invisible text – Placing an excessive amount of keywords in white lettering, on a white background, which makes search engines see your “keyword use,” as opposed to having quality, relevant content.

• Gateway pages – Fake pages, stuffed with a few main keywords, which are designed to be seen by search spiders and not the user.
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Where You’ll Hurt

A few weeks back, Google announced the release of their new search engine algorithm that will penalize over-optimized sites for employing various black hat SEO tactics. In an attempt to make room for smaller businesses trying to utilize quality SEO, the new algorithm will identify improper SEO and punish the site.

If you’re hoping to get a new marketing campaign off the ground, these tactics will do the exact opposite. While Google has yet to spell out the penalties to be enforced with the new algorithm, it’s safe to say the current penalties are enough to slow down any avid black hat SEO user.

• Loss of page rank, which is very difficult to recover from

• Dramatically dropped from SERPs, potentially resulting in a severe loss of revenue

• Banned from Google search engine, potentially for good

In the case of running a successful marketing campaign, all these penalties would drastically affect the outcome. Without Google search rankings, your website and future campaigns will gain minimal unique readers or traffic.


White Hat SEO

In order to comply with the new Google algorithm, and be valuable to your readers, white hat SEO is the way to go. Utilizing these tactics will show that your website, which plays a significant role in elevating your marketing campaign, is valuable. When this happens, you move up in search rankings and gain a better PR.

• Relevant Content – Creating relevant, informational content shows search engines that you are serving your purpose as a website. In order to create better search results for users, Google wants to eliminate websites and pages that appear as valuable, when in reality they’re just over-optimized.

• Structural keywords – Google spiders that search your website consider the keywords in your title, headers, and sub headers to be the most important. Instead of stuffing your content or utilizing invisible keywords, be sure to include them in these valuable spots. Google sees this as good, and ranks you accordingly.

• Quality linking – Many companies purchase back links from sites. This is clear to search spiders when you have an astronomic amount of back links leading to your site. Create organic relationships and superior content in order to achieve the back links from well received websites. This is what Google will want to see and reward.

Practicing white hat SEO will not only be better for your readers, but keep you from getting booted all together. Google spiders are able to see over optimization, and the consequences aren’t worth messing with. If you want to run a successful marketing campaign, say goodbye to the dark side and hello to quality SEO.

Bio: Jessica Sanders is an avid small business writer touching on topics from social media to phone systems. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including payroll processing for lead generation resource, Resource Nation.