For many of you this will be revisiting the basics. We could all do with a little refresher course on what’s important in SEO now and then.

It’s common for SEO clients to pick and choose what they want included in their SEO campaign. Many SEO consultants will, often against their better judgment, agree to a scaled-down campaign that suits the client (or rather the client’s budget). If you’re thinking of saving money on SEO, you should be aware that if you leave out certain elements you may not be negating the entire campaign, but you will certainly be limiting your scope for success.

Here’s a list of what absolutely cannot be left out of your SEO campaign:

1. Check domain integrity and canonicalization issues to ensure that, basically, there is only one version of your home page.
2. Elimination of any inadvertent Black Hat elements such as invisible text, cloaking, or keyword stuffing, or any links that could be construed as paid links in any way by Google.
3. Thorough keyword research to ensure that you are optimizing for the phrases that exactly match what your customers will be searching for, and nothing else.
4. Website audit along with competitive analysis to ensure that you are in a position to compete with websites presently at the top of a search for your chosen keywords.
5. Page title tags. These have to be perfect for each page because they are critical to your Google success.
6. SEO content creation. The goal is to fill your pages with content that will impress Google and entice your customers.
7. Link building. Without sufficient quality, incoming links you cannot compete. Be careful of purchasing links because Google has ways of sniffing them out and will penalize you decisively.
8. Monitor results of your SEO campaign for all you’re worth. This is key to future SEO work. If you dispense with this step you might as well give up and settle for failure.

Cloaking: Nefarious form of Black Hat

Of all the various methods of getting a website to show further up in search results, cloaking is the one  that’s pretty much unanimously regarded as ‘Black Hat.’ There are some pertinent reasons why this is so.

But first, what exactly is cloaking? Here’s Google’s definition:

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.

The Penalty for Cloaking

If you are caught cloaking by the search engines (it’s actually more a case of when than if), you will be immediately removed from the major search engines (and most others too).  If it’s bad enough you could also be blacklisted. This means that not only will you have to begin again with marketing your site, but you will also have to purchase another domain name. That’s as bad as it gets with a search engine penalty.

If you are a website owner and you hire an SEO consultant, be absolutely sure about their intentions and their ethics. And never buy software that claims to be able to cloak your pages or links or anything else. It’s simply not worth the huge risk involved.

What’s Left When You’re Busted?

And if by some miserable chance you were cloaking for a client you will have a reputation in tatters and may even be the subject of a lawsuit.

So why do people insist on using cloaking? Personally I have a hard time understanding why anyone would take the risks when there are so many other ethical ways to optimize your site that don’t involve cheating the search engines.

It is important to understand that the search engines are there to provide a service and if they turn a blind eye to sites that try to cheat them they will be ruining their own business. So who can blame them for coming down so hard?