I absolutely abhor SEO spamming techniques. It is unethical and does not work in the long term.

Recently a website that I have been working on (not my client but under a subcontract) had been contracted out to an SEO firm. When the files were returned the DOCTYPE was missing from all of the pages. When I contacted the firm as to why they had been removed they told me that they always remove anything that has nothing to do with improving SEO. Groan.

The DOCTYPE is just HTML, but it tells the browser(s) how it should interpret the code on the page. In fact spiders treat HTML as just HTML. They don’t index it at all. This SEO firm used lots of œcomment tags thinking it will help. It won’t. It is a myth. Comment tags are HTML and are ignored. They had added so much info to the tags that it added over 3KB to one page alone.

What the spiders pay attention to are:

1. META description tag
2. META keyword tag (Google no longer pays attention to the keyword tag because of it being used as spam.)
3. Title tag
4. Alt tag used with images. The description should be appropriate. If it is a pool say so, but there is no rule against saying where the pool is. Incorporate the information in.
5. Title tag in links. This also should be appropriate to the site and particular page.
6. Content, content, content. The content should be updated on a regular basis. Spiders love to see fresh content.
7. Clean and well written code. If the code is bloated (think of pasting content from a Word to HTML), ending tags are missing, excessive use of nested tables well the spiders will decide enough is enough and stop spidering the site.
8. A good site map. Think of an index that is in the back of a book if you have a decent sized website. If it’s also a very large site having a search feature would be an excellent tool for visitors.

The SEO firm also used poor grammar just to fit keywords and keyword phrases in and just looks unprofessional.