100 points to know about...
Eco-Design Web Development

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques are used to get a better position in search engines' results pages, to ultimately generate more user traffic. However, some SEO practices are excessive, unsustainable, and often violate search engines' terms of service. These kinds of practices are called Black Hat SEO and they may increase the visibility of your website in the short term, but they do nothing to build user trust in the long term. Abiding by ethical and sustainable SEO practices means avoiding Black Hat SEO. In doing so, your website will have long term visibility in search engines, and users will be able to find relevant content.

Here are some examples of Black Hat SEO and concrete measures to apply to avoid them:

Cloaking

This technique involves getting search engines to rank content for a particular search term that does not match your web page's content. This could take on the form of showing users outdated Flash, hiding search terms, and having more HTML than text and more images than the actual content.

Instead of this, try:

• Building websites in the web standard HTML
• Matching multimedia to content
• Producing more written content compared to the number of HTML tags

Keyword stuffing and duplicating content

Keyword stuffing consists of the overuse of a keyword within your content (such as an article). Duplicating content means publishing identical content on more than one web page. Both are done to attract search engines, but they go against search engine guidelines.

Instead of this, try:

• Looking at Google's 'related searches' suggestions for ideas on the correct keywords for content
• Creating pages for 'related searches' instead of for synonyms
• Using a duplicate content checker to assess the authenticity of your content

Adding interstitials

Interstitials are content that interrupts the user experience, such as advertisements and pop-ups. Not only do they hinder user navigation and are considered 'intrusive' by Google, but they also increase the loading time of websites.

Instead of this, try:

• Removing advertisements and pop-ups
• Placing necessary notifications below 'the fold' of web pages (the part of a website that is visible without scrolling)
• Choosing modern software (like WordPress) to help you build faster websites

Please note! Practices that aim to optimize the performance of a page according to Google's guidelines and rules are considered White Hat SEO.