Have you been banned lately'? No, I didnt say hugged, I said BANNED as in blacklisted!

Search engines are so committed to cleaning up their indexes that in the frenzy to remove sites, even clean and borderline sites are getting banned. Hopefully the information presented in this article can help you prevent your site from even being considered for deletion.

As an internet marketing veteran of over 10 years, I have experienced a large variety of business changing phenomenas. I have watched search engines come and go, as well as techniques to get free search engine traffic change and evolve. In this series of articles and in my Special Report available at my web site ArticleUnderground.com, Ill share some of the secrets that can help you stay in the game and prosper for a long time!

Ban Proof Technique: Reasonable Keyword Density / Avoid Hidden Text

Back in the day, all it took was figuring out the exact formula for keyword density and Id be able to optimize a dozen or so of my pages to dominate the search results. The competition wasnt so great, so I could easily get top ten rankings for keywords that got lots of traffic. It was a fun game! But as with all good things, the word got around and soon everyone and their mother were building web pages and trying to get that free search engine traffic. Each webmaster was studying what the other webmasters were doing and were trying to one up them and leap frog to the top of the ranks.

Increased competition and the demands of the marketplace required that the landscape must change.

One of the first things that the search engines figured out was that spammers tended to stuff their web pages with hundreds or even thousands of hidden keywords. Sometimes referred to as keyword stuffing, it was common to find web pages with blocks of hidden text at the bottom, mixed in with the same color of the web page background.

Search engines figured out text and backgrounds shouldnt be the same color and developed algorithms to catch web pages using this trick.

When it became common knowledge among webmasters this hidden text keyword stuffing technique could work against you, webmasters found clever ways to NOT hide the text (similar colors as background, but not exact) and still stuff the keywords.

These days, the search engines simply dont rank pages with too many repeated words and it is generally agreed upon by SEOs (search engine optimization experts) that the ideal density for a keyword phrase should be between 1% and 3% which is within the reasonable amount that should keep your web page from the scrutiny of a human reveiwer.

Ive provided webmasters a great free tool to measure the denisty of your web pages including 2 and 3 word phrases. Its called the Article Underground Keyword Density Analyzer Tool, or AUKDAT for short! Its available online at http://www.articleunderground.com/webmaster/keyword-density-tool.html Its the only density analyzer I am aware of that actually measures 2 and 3 word phrases!

Since search engines are now employing human reviewers it is also wise to make sure that your content reads naturally and does not appear to be artificially forcing a keyword phrase down the readers throats.

If you want to play it safe, make sure your web pages do not contain obvious or blatant repetition of keywords and that the phrases fall into the 1% to 3% range. A little less, or a little over should be ok, but as a rule, shoot for that range.