Internet marketing has become immensely popular among emerging and established businesses. Look for it on any search engine and you will come across thousands of online marketing companies, techniques and SEO gurus. With so many options available on the Internet, people often stumble into unethical practices that can harm their marketing campaign in the long run.

Here are some of the most common pitfalls and bad practices that should be avoided while pursuing the avenues of Internet marketing:

Spamming can ruin your brand image:

Many companies go for shortcuts such as forum, blog and email spam to get a quick traffic boost. However, these activities can tarnish the image of your brand. In addition, if your competitors and bloggers get a whiff of such unethical practices, they will pounce upon the opportunity to spread the word and damage your reputation. You should especially avoid spamming if you are running an e-commerce website as potential customers might come across your questionable tactics. Customers will only buy your products and services if they trust you.

Avoid black hat SEO techniques:

There are many SEO companies that use unethical, black hat techniques to increase the search engine ranking of websites. While this approach can certainly create an illusion of high visibility on the Internet, its benefits have a rather short life in most cases. Search engines penalize websites that indulge in black hat SEO techniques by reducing their page rank for a long time. Be sure to ask your SEO firm to provide you with details of all methods they will be using as a part of their SEO campaign. If you are finding it hard to figure out some of the techniques, then consult someone who understands how search engine optimization works, to be on the safe side.

Black hat SEO techniques include building link-farms and doorway pages, which contain little or no original content, and are only created to game search engines. Keyword stuffing – the excessive use of high volume keywords on a web page – was one of the first techniques used by SEO experts to gain page rank. However, almost all major search engines now quickly detect such pages and penalize them.

Exchanging links with partner websites is good for search engine optimization, but don’t fall for shady link-exchange programs that are solely created for SEO purposes. The same is true for websites that offer to make thousands of directory submissions for your website. Search engines often reduce the page rank of websites that participate in such programs. Only submit your pages to popular and relevant directories.