This page is designed to show many of the worst practice seo ideas. I have not used cloaking, and have not heavily link exchanged this page...as far as on the page SEO, this page does just about everything wrong.

I did also place a noindex robots meta tag on this page so major search engine will never index it.

Comments Tag Search Engine Marketing

If I were to try to spam with comments tags it would look something like this  in the source code.

Img Alt Tags Search Engine Marketing

If you look off to the left of this line you will see a super small image of my black hat. Many sites use invisible or small 1 by 1 pixil images and then load them up with img alt tags that are keyword dense. Most search engines ignore this. Some sites use a huge string of keywords on every image. As a general rule of thumb they should all be somewhat different and read well to a person who has images turned off. The stuffed img alt tag looks like this

a good img alt tag would be more like <img src="black-hat-seo.jpg" alt="Black Hat SEO logo.">

As an added tip, if you must use images or menus for navigation it is a good idea to place text links at the bottom of the page.

Meta Tags Search Engine Marketing

Meta Description tag - Since many websites were keyword stuffing this tag it has lost much of its relevance to most major search engines. If I were to spam using a meta description tag it would look something like this.

The meta description tag should be a sentence to a paragraph about the page content which reads well to the human eye. You may want to try to get multiple variations of your keywords, but it should not be overly repetitive. A good meta description tag would be something more like

You actually may want it to be a bit longer with more detail, but that is the general idea. Use a couple versions of your primary keyword phrases.

Meta Keywords tag -

Most search engines ignore this tag and many top SEO firms do not even use it. The keywords tag is used for misspellings and synonyms. Each phrase should be comma separated. The important thing to realize is that the keywords tag itself is not that important. Yahoo! uses this tag to include a page for the phrase listed if the phrase does not appear on your page or in links pointing to your page.

Notice how in those tags I am using the s version of optimization and other than that it does not appear on the page.

Other Meta Tags - generally there is no reason to use other meta tags unless you want spiders to not index your page.

Page Title Search Engine Marketing

An example of a bad page title is

<title>SEARCh ENGINE MARKETING OPTIMIZATION WEBSITE POSITIONING SEO SEARCH MARKETING TO THE SEARCH ENGINES USING SEO, PROFESSIONAL SEARCH MARKEING SPAMMING SEARCH ENGINES</title>

The page title is the first thing a searcher sees in the search results and thus is extremely important. The longer you make your title, the less relevance each word has in the overall title. The first words are also the most important words. A good page title should include your keywords. I typically usually favor shorter page titles. The title should be different for each web page. A good example for this page might be

<title>Search Engine Marketing Worst Practices - Black Hat SEO</title>

Bolding all keywords Search Engine Marketing

This page is about search engine marketing. You can learn how to use search engines to market your website in search results.

Sometimes bolding is necessary for effect, but if you are bolding just for ranking effects it will likely look stupid and turn away potential customers. If you use bolding too excessively it looses its effect. A similar effect can be created using extreme amounts of heading tags and repeating the same words over and over again in them. I used search engine marketing as an example on this page.

Keyword Stuffing Search Engine Marketing

Sometimes you will be reading text then role up on a blurb like "Search engine marketing markets web sites and the websites in professional search engines search results search engines search engines and more search engines see the search results while searching the web."

Assuming a search engine liked that garbage it still would fail to convert human eyes.

Hidden Inputs Search Engine Marketing

Similar to the comments tags there are other ways of delivering text to the search engine which the end user does not see. In all reality the use of these deceptive means usually indicates a lack of site quality. Some of the other means are

form element hidden inputs (there are sometimes legitimate reason to use them, but this example assumes they are being used to fool search engines)
<input type=hidden name=context value="SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING SPAM">
noframes tags (there are sometimes legitimate reason to use them, but this example assumes they are being used to fool search engines)
<NOFRAMES><P>SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING SPAM <A href="http://bla.com">SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING SPAM</A></p></NOFRAMES>
noscript tags (there are sometimes legitimate reason to use them, but this example assumes they are being used to fool search engines)
<SCRIPT type="text/tcl">
no real content
</SCRIPT>
<NOSCRIPT>
<P>SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING SPAM <A href="http://bla.com">SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING SPAM</A></p>
</NOSCRIPT>
invisible text <font color="#FFFFFF">SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING SPAM HERE</font> if you click and scroll downward you will see wonderful delicious hidden text spam...absolutely worthless!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING SPAM SPAM Marketing SEARCH ENGINES
Excessively small text <font size="1">Search Engine Marketing spam here</font>

That pretty much covers most of the on page bad stuff. You should be successful if you

stay away from the stuff listed on this page
stay away from the bad neighborhoods
build a site that is a great resource in your field of study

If you would like you can view the source of this page to see what the comments tags look like, etc. view-source:http://www.blackhatseo.com/bad-seo.shtml

best of luck
- aaron

back to black hat seo this work is licensed under a creative commons license.

Questions, Comments, Concerns? Ask me or visit the search engine marketing forums