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A guest blog from Andrew Parker of Dreamscape Design

Google SERPs are what all SEO clients will judge you on! Sure, Yahoo and Bing are important, but Google are the leaders. The big cheese, big gun, chief, chieftain, controller, director, dominator, employer, chief exec, executive, online foreman, head honcho, big wig, leader, overseer, the online dons, superintendent, and top dog. Err…to put it simply, in search engine optimisation terms, they are pretty damn untouchable!

Firstly, what is this SEO malarkey? This is the process of getting your website to perform the best it possibly can in Google. Listed below are the 10 best ways to get your site banned or ignored by Google.

1. Paying for/selling links. This is usually done in bulk, so if you suddenly gain hundreds of links in a short space of time, Google will be onto you like a demented pit-bull on a poodle.
2. Keyword stuffing basically means sneakily inserting keywords in the meta-tags or the main content on the web pages. This is often used by spammers to incorporate keywords that have no relevance to the actual pages and is used to trick all us lovely and honest people into clicking onto their page. The swines!
3. Presenting content to search engines which is different to the content being presented to the user (otherwise known as cloaking). This is a filthy, deceptive and cheap trick – on a par with if Silvio Berlusconi started meeting girls online after claiming that he is a 23 year old virgin – that search engines have thankfully become wise to. Doing this is literally a huge big steaming waste of time and should never be done. Err… BTW Berlusconi hasn’t claimed to be a 23 year old virgin. It was just an example.
4. A collection of freelancers from “content farms” employed to produce specific search engine-friendly content to boost websites in Google, which means more traffic to the website. Google sees this as a big no-no, as the quality of the content suffers as a result. This tactic smells like a farm with high manure production – which Google will easily sniff out.
5. Avoid sites with spam like the plague! It is like being sneezed on by someone with flu – you will soon come down with the same symptoms.
6. You certainly shouldn’t do traditional link exchanges anymore. This practice is about as old as they come – and sorry to be ageist, but old people aren’t well known for winning the London Marathon! You won’t finish 1^st in Google if you concentrate on this and your website is likely to be (metaphorically) gasping and being helped into the back of an ambulance wearing an oxygen mask. Therefore link building needs to involve clever tactics to gain a one-way links, and ensure you finish your campaign with a gold medal around your neck.
7. Posting links on comment pages on every website you come across is like being the hopelessly drunk guy in the bar that “hits on” every passing girl. You’ll left with about as much respect as him – but unfortunately, the online stigma is a lot more long lasting than a hangover.
8. Rewording stuff and claiming them to be your own work is a very dangerous tactic and should be avoided at all costs. Beady Eye may have gotten away with ransacking John Lennon’s back catalogue, but Liam Gallagher didn’t have the mighty Google to deal with. Articles should therefore be researched properly and be original.
9. Flash and Javascript should be avoided. They have no benefit to SEO and are about as useful as those decorative lumps that sit either side of Alan Sugar. If you do use flash, then make it small and insignificant.
10. Not a major way to annoy Google (hence it being at No. 10 and it again won’t cause you to be banned) but search engines aren’t too keen on duplicate content, as they only want to rank the same content once – so make every page have unique content.

You will need to avoid these above 10 points if your site is to become the big cheese, big gun, chief, chieftain, controller, director, dominator, employer, chief exec, executive, online foreman, head honcho, big wig, leader, overseer, the online dons, superintendent, and top dog for your niche in the search engines.

Andrew Parker is a Search Engine Optimisation expert at leading web design company Dreamscape Design.