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Cheating the Search Engines

Note: This is a list of things that often will get you punished by search engines.  I'm in no way recommending that you do most of these techniques.  There are a few that are ok depending on how you perform the technique.

Since search engine traffic is a nice, free way to gain visitors people often resort to tricks to try and get more visitors.  While these tricks may work for a while, search engine robots are always getting smarter and may punish you in the future for what seems to work today.

First, a little history of the keyword meta tag.  The idea behind this tag was to allow page authors to tag their pages with keywords to help searchers find the page.  But spammers took their toll and made this tag almost useless to a point where the major search engines no longer support it.  Some of the techniques below are on a path to the same point.

Cloaking
Cloaking is showing the search engine robot one page and users another.  This sounds like a bad thing, but it can be very useful (and safe) if done correctly.  The key is to make the version sent to the search engine pretty equivalent to the version sent to users.  But, you can leave out fancy formatting and graphics to the search engine version and still be safe.

Where this becomes a bad idea is sending the search engine a page with keywords that have nothing to do with the actual topic of the page. 

Keyword Stuffing
Either using keywords that have nothing to do with the page or repeating keywords is called keyword stuffing.  Yes you should use keywords that apply to your page.  No you shouldn't use keywords that have nothing to do with your page just to trick visitors into coming. 

Hidden Text
Using white text on a white background, or black on black, or any color close to the background is a bad idea.  Most search engine robots have long been able to detect this trick and you won't get any benefit.  The same applies to using really small text.

False Redirects
Sending visitors to another page than what they saw in the SERPs is a bad idea.

If you change a page name and need to legitimally redirect visitors you should use a 301 redirect instead. 

Misspelling of common domains
Unless your photographic specialty doesn't involve clothing, this probably isn't something you'd try.  But registering a domain such as Gooogle and hoping to get visitors by typos is not a good idea.  First, most of the good (relatively speaking) are already taken.  But more importantly you'll risk legal action from the owner of the real domain.

What to do?
So, what's the best way to get good search engine results?  The best advice I've seen is to write your page for the visitor and the search engines will follow.  Search engine companies are always trying to make their results more valid, so get your pages as valid as possible.