SEO is one of the inevitable activities all online entrepreneurs and businesses have to engage. Without proper SEO, you site and pages will not be visible to as many potential customers as it should. Low traffic definitely corresponds to low performance and fewer sales. Fortunately, there are several ways to go about improving SEO including white hat tactics, grey tactics and black hat tricks. Basically, white hat tactics ate tailored towards user experience and human audience and they are the most recommended. However, the result of such techniques may not give you the edge you need. Sometimes, more aggressive grey and black hat techniques may be needed for better results. Black hat tricks are very aggressive and target search bots and machines instead of humans and user experience.

When developing an SEO strategy, it is advisable not to include black hat techniques as they can easily get your sites banned and restricted as they do not follow SEO guidelines provided by most search engines. Grey hat tricks lie in between white hat techniques and the black area. They may or may not get you into trouble, but their results are much better than using white hat techniques alone. Over the years, Click Trends has been providing various insights into SEO and the developments taking place including emerging trends. This is yet another look into SEO, this time focusing on “risky” techniques. They are considered risky since they may lead to problems with user experience or fall into the grey hat category. As such, Click Trends does not guarantee any result; we are only sharing the techniques. Here is a list of 12 risky SEO tactics that may give you amazing results;

1. Adding 1000 More Words to Articles and Homepage

Adding 1000 more words to your articles and homepage may seem like the right thing to do for SEO. It gives you more opportunities to include keywords, links and citations. All search engines love longer content and view sites with more words as high authority content authors. By adding 1000 more words to your pages and content, your ranking in search engines will go up within a matter of days. According to a study by SerpIQ, most pages and websites that rank at number 1 have more than 2000 words. While many words are easier to integrate into articles, you can still do this for other pages including home, about and contact pages. You will need in-depth content explaining the topic and make sure to provide value to your visitors. Unfortunately, this technique is considered risky as it can hurt your user experience since one loves text blocks and several wordings

2. Buy Expired Domains

Buying expired domains is another technique you can use to improve your SEO. When a domain expires, it is soon offered for sale and you can tap into such opportunities before the owners purchase them back. Google will usually note such actions and may just decide it is harmless especially if the domain is rather too old. After buying these expired domains, you can use them for 301 redirects to take traffic to your website or even keep them alive and decide to build backlinks to your site. Just make sure the domains are within your niche. There are several sites that offer expired domains for sale and finding them should not be a daunting task.

3. Using negative SEO

This is a technique that might seem awkward and time consuming, but it does pay. Negative SEO simply involves trailing your competitors and looking up their websites to see if they are employing any shady SEO tactics. Therefore, you will need to know the “black hat tactics” that search engines punish or ban sites for using. Once you know this, look at your competitors and report any shady SEO strategy used. By exposing them, you will be doing search engines like Google a big favor and your ranking will also improve. When competitors are taken out, it gives you room to advance and take up the vacancy in #1. Google does not really follow up these tactics, yet they will take note of such reports and other visitors will also lose trust in your competitors. It may be risky if there is no shady practice being done by your competitors.

4. Try Buying Available Domain

Besides, this is more of a white hat technique unless you timely purchase a domain soon after it is made available and immediately use it for redirects. Like buying expired domains, available domains are those that were active at some point and have only recently gone underground. If the domain still has content and backlinks, you can use them to send traffic to your site. Usually, redirects offer an easy way out as visitors are immediately taken to your site instead of the original URL. However, it is more recommendable to keep such domains alive (active) and instead build backlinks to your site. You can even create more content or change parts of the existing pages to send more visitors to your other website where you want more traffic. Again there are many opportunities to buy available domains and all you will need to do is perform a search to see whether the domain is available or already taken. Remember to pick domains within your niche.

5. Make Small Changes to Your Site More Often

Most SEO specialists have been using this trick for quite some time now and it does not take much effort to understand how it works. Search engines like Google will usually notice if you refresh your site with new content. When they note this, they send crawlers to re-crawl the site and give you ranking increments. Google loves new content and making small website changes (not necessarily new content) will trick them into thinking you have refreshed the site. By frequently making small changes to the site, you will get slight SEO benefits and your site will advance the ranks slowly. However, Google may notice this if you overdo it and penalize you for tricking their crawlers. It is therefore advisable to be very cautious not to tick off Google. Make the changes bolder and target various areas from content formats to website layout and link and keyword positioning.

6. Create Your Own Unique Doorway Page

If you have been in the SEO world for a considerable time, then you probably already understand what a doorway page is. In fact, Google will most likely penalise you for doorway pages that do not provide enough value to the visitors. However, not all such pages are penalised. If you can get to briefly describe the topic in question and provide value to your customers, Google will embrace your doorway page and rank you better. Doorway pages are basically pages that have been heavily optimised to rank highly on one to two keywords. They are usually short and include the optimised keyword a number of times. Such pages will get high ranking on search engines as they provide value and explain a given topic in only a few words. Unfortunately, you can get punished especially if you are using the cheaply looking software-engineered pages that cause more confusion to clients. Google are not particularly in favour of doorway pages since most cause more confusion than value and some are just designed for aggressive SEO.

7. Use Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is another efficient way to get your SEO up but it is nowhere near white hat techniques. Social bookmarking allows you to backlink and send some rich links to your site. With this technique, you can add, edit, annotate and even share bookmarks of your website documents. By sharing these bookmarks over social networks and other platforms, you increase your online presence and people can also click on the links which lead to your website. There are several sites that offer social bookmarking and you can review the existing options to find a reliable solution.

8. Spinning Tactic

Article spinning is definitely prohibited by Google guidelines and can get you into trouble for duplicate content. Nonetheless, if you know how to do it right, then you can get more articles from a single creation and send them to multiple platforms from backlinks. It generally involves rephrasing and using a lot of synonyms to by-pass plagiarism and copy-pasting algorithms in place to detect spanned articles. You should use different headings, change the formatting and bullets to make the article as different from the original as possible without losing its value. There are spinning software you can use, but most will not deliver desirable results. If you must, make sure to carefully proofread and subject to copy-pasting checkers before uploading.

9. Micro-sites

Like the name suggests, microsites are small highly optimised sites that are similar to your main website. Microsites can be used to give more value to your website and also backlink to your main pages. Essentially, it is more or a one-page site that acts as the landing page and is a more complex doorway page. Microsites are independent of your main website and basically rank as separate websites. However, they should have the same information and should be as similar as possible to your site. When visitors get to a microsite, the next click immediately takes them to your main site which should contain the value they are looking for. It is like a small website prototype and can have more than one page if you want to elude Google’s attention.

10. Maintain The Anchor Text Keyword
When building links to your main site, it is common for many to use words such as “read more, special deals, find more, and continue” among such. This is because Google loves such anchor texts as they tell the customer exactly what they should do. Perhaps you have realized some SEO experts maintain their keywords as the anchor text for backlinks. If you are optimizing for a keyword like “risky SEO tactics”, you can incorporate the same anchor text and make it you link. Google may penalize you for this type of link building if overdone. It is a tactic to implement in moderation and not all the time or the same keywords.

11. Build Links Through Events

If you can put together events from time to time, you will get SEO improvements each time. Events can help you build links and get more traffic to your site, which will force Google algorithms to rank you highly. However, Google sees event link building as unnatural and they are not so much in support of this tactic. You can put together a local or digital event and advertise it to various platforms to get more backlinks. Remember not to have events every other day or week.

12. Submit Some Articles & Links to Directories

Submitting to directories is not prohibited by search engines but it is not any close white hat techniques. Directories are mainly designed for search engines rather than people and Google does not embrace a lot of tools and practices that do not target better user experience. In fact, this is the only risk involved if your visitors are overly sensitive about user experience. By submitting your content to directories, you can have various backlinks to your main site or a page that ranks highly on search results. Nonetheless, you will need to carefully pick your directories as not all you come across will be of help. Choose directories that already rank highly.

Summary
There are several other SEO tactics out there and the list is probably inexhaustible. Obviously, ranking involves numerous algorithms and checks to decide which page ranks at #1 for a given keyword or search phrase. The above tactics may provide some amazing results from your SEO if carefully implemented. It is usually advisable to lookup what search engines like Google say about a given “risky” tactic and what their penalties are concerning a given SEO technique. This will help you draft a thin line to walk on and still take full advantage of existing SEO tactics whether white hat techniques or not. Not all these tactics provide the same result and it is ill-advised to try them all at the same time. Simply consider one tactic, find out more about what it largely involves and try to implement it to note the impact on your SEO. You can adapt the others gradually until you realize the full potential.