In the race to have your website ranked highly in search engine results pages, don’t fall for blackhat marketing methods. Blackhat marketing is a term used to refer to marketing that isn’t ethical.

Instead of focusing on productive, long term strategies, those who practice blackhat marketing are looking for quick, short term results. Not only can blackhat marketing traps negatively influence customers, but they can also result in your site be permanently banned from search engines.

Since search engines are a major way of gaining traffic, you don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize your good standing. It’s important to learn what these blackhat marketing methods are and what you can do for traffic and rankings instead.

Originally, search engines ranked a site based on the number of links to it. This quickly led dishonest website owners to create a system that is now commonly known as link farming.

A large pool of webmasters would each link to other websites that in turn linked to them. If Webmaster A had fifty people working with him then he had fifty links to his site, making his site seem more valuable to search engines.

Of course, this method is no longer effective due to the increasing ability of search engine algorithms to recognize this technique. Instead, try to get links from websites relevant to your own. Contact webmasters of sites that are well written, informative and have a strong PageRank in the search engines.

Another common blackhat method is to stuff pages with keywords. This can be done by using words that are the same color as the background or by simply writing sentences that overuse the keywords.

Regardless of the method used, this is still a poor idea and search engine algorithms will penalize your website. Instead, try using keywords in your text headings, naming your website pages appropriately, setting up your permalink structure correctly, and writing well thought out sentences instead of garbled keyword rich paragraphs.

An additional blackhat method to avoid is doorway pages. These are pages that contain keywords relevant to the visitor’s search term but they contain no real information and don’t contribute to the website.

These pages might get you ranked in search engines but they’ll eventually be detected and your site could get banned. Instead of using doorway pages, write articles relevant to your business and submit them to search engine directories.

Include your website in the bio box or body of the article (if allowed) and you have another link to your website. You can also comment on blogs related to your niche and receive traffic that way. Just make sure your comments are relevant and on topic – not spammy.