There is plenty of SEO marketing advice on the Web today; some good and some bad. It's important to be able to distinguish between the good advice that comes from white hat, ethical search engine optimization professionals and the horrible advice that comes from the black hat SEO spammers. If the tips and tricks seem too simple and too good to be true, they probably are. Here’s a list of some of the worst SEO advice that you should avoid at all costs.

• Hide lists of links on your Web page to be picked up by search engine spiders. Many black hat SEO firms hide keywords behind the scenes of the Website to be crawled by search engine spiders. Although these cannot be seen by the visitor, if they are discovered by the search engines, your site could be penalized. If you are using META tags in the correct manner, you have nothing to worry about. However, hiding full lists of keywords on your site is a definite no-no.

• Stuff your content full of keywords. Keyword stuffing is a horrible idea for two reasons. One is that your content becomes unreadable and your visitors will leave the Website immediately. Two, keyword stuffing is forbidden by Google and other search engines and doing so will get you sent straight to the Google blacklist. To avoid keyword stuffing keep your keywords to about one per paragraph. This will allow for Google to pick up on your key phrases but ensure they don't interfere with the readability of your copy for your visitors.

• Use any link exchange to increase link popularity. Although link exchanges are a great way to generate links and more links equal higher rankings, it's important to make sure the site that is linking back to you is relevant. If you own a salon and your Website is to promote your business, having a sporting goods store site link back to you isn't a relevant, reliable source. Search engines will not reward high rankings to sites that have irrelevant links, so make sure you go with quality over quantity in this department.

• Try to rank for unrelated keywords to generate more traffic. Trying to rank for every keyword in cyberspace to drive the most possible traffic to your site is useless. You aren't going to be able to rank for unrelated keywords and even if by some miracle you do, once people click your site and realize it isn’t what they thought it was going to be, they'll leave in hurry and never return.

• Submit your Website to thousands of search engines and directories at once. Websites that promise to submit your site to thousands of directories for a fee are untrustworthy. Don't fall for their schemes. Instead, concentrate on increasing your link popularity organically and you'll receive more rewards in the long run.

• Believe an search engine optimization marketing specialist that guarantees a number one spot on search engines. Although it's possible for an SEO specialist to get your site to the number one ranking, it takes time and a lot of effort. Also, there are a lot of factors that cannot be controlled and search engines are ever-changing. For this reason, you should not believe an SEO firm that makes promises to get your site to number one. If they express that they're doing what they can to get your site as high up in the rankings as possible, then it's more likely that they are an ethical, organic SEO firm. However, remember that the only people who really know how Web crawlers operate are the Web crawling programmers. There are so many variables that determine page rank, it's impossible to know them all, which makes it impossible to guarantee high rankings.

• Listen to SEO marketing experts who say search engines can't index your site because of the coding. Although there are some poorly coded pages that create problems for search engines, for the most part, whether you code your Website using HTML, XHTML, CSS, ASP, PHP, Javascript or a mix, search engines will be able to find and crawl your Web pages. If an SEO firm is demanding to re-design your entire site to make it more SEO-friendly, ask a second opinion before going through with it, because they may just be trying to squeeze more money out of you.

Conducting your own research, talking to many different search marketing firms and experts and continuing to educate yourself on SEO is the only way to ensure you don't fall for the black hat SEO tricks. However, if you follow these tips and make yourself aware of the dangers of unethical SEO, you will be able to stay away from the bad SEO firms and build an Internet marketing team that will actually help your business rather than hurt it.